
Class 


.331 


"'SIS' 


Book 


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'3 




PRESENTED 


BV ^'^vi 





I! 



THE 

PARABLES OF JESUS 



By the Same Author 

THE MIRACLES 
OF JESUS 

as Marks on the Way of Life 

" Strong, cheerful, burden-lift- 
ing words for the battle of life 
and the fight of faith." 

— ^The Speaker. 

" In its truest and best sense, 
an original treatment of these 
works of power." 

— ^The Church Times. 

A New American Edition 



Net, $i.6o 



E. P. BUTTON & COMPANY 

New York 



THE 
PARABLES OF JESUS 



By the Right Reverend 
COSMO GORDON LANG, D.D., D.C.L. 

Archbishop of York 



NEW AMERICAN EDITION 




NEW YORK 

E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 

68 1 Fifth Avenue 



IV r- 






NEW AMERICAN EDITION 
April, 191 8 

me 4 m 



AUG 2risTe >^i 



Printed in the United States of America 



TO 

MY FATHER AND MOTHER 



PREFACE 

The following papers were written in 
response to many requests from those who 
had read my former very unpretentious 
volume on ^The Miracles of Jesus," and 
who wished to have some of the Parables 
treated in a similar manner. Like the 
papers on the Miracles, they were origin- 
ally published month by month in Good 
Words; like them, they were written 
under great difficulties and in the midst of 
other pressing work. They are, therefore, 
inevitably marked by the same obvious 
shortcomings. I hope that they may be 
read separately rather than as chapters in 
a consecutive book. 



viii PREFACE 

It would be mere presumption to attempt 
to write anything on the subject of the 
Parables without using the guidance of 
Archbishop Trench's scholarship and in- 
sight; but I have thought it best not to 
consult any other commentaries. 

C. G. L. 

Amen Court, 

S. Paul's Cathedral, 
November y 1905. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

The Use of Parables in the Teaching of 

Jesus 3 

The Sower 

I. the seed is the word ... 13 

II. the wayside soil . . . . 17 

III. THE thin-surfaced SOIL . . 20 

iv. the choked soil .... 26 

v. the good soil . . . . 35 

The Mustard Seed and the Leaven . 

i. the characteristics of the king- 
DOM 41 

ii. the mustard seed ... 47 

iii. the leaven 53 

iv. the kingdom in the soul . . 54 

v. the kingdom in the world . 56 

The Hid Treasure and the Pearl of 

Great Price 

i. the truth possessed ... 63 

ii. the truth attained by sacrifice 65 

iii. the nature of the sacrifice . 68 

iv. the hid treasure . . . 7 1 

v. the treasure at our feet . . 73 



X CONTENTS 

PAGE 

The Hid Treasure and the Pearl of 
Great Price — continued 

VI. THE treasure FOUND AND HIDDEN 75 

vii. the pearl of great price . . .76 

viii. the quest of the pearl . . 77 

ix. the value of the pearl . . 78 

The Ten Virgins 

i. the divine advent ... 83 

ii. the lamp an outward sign . . 89 

iii. the inward spirit . . . 9o 

iv. the times of sleep ... 92 

v. the awakening . . . . 94 

vi. the exhausted oil ... 96 

vii. vain is the help of man . . 97 

viii. the close of opportunity . . 99 

The Talents 

i. the strict account . . . io3 

ii. the use of natural gifts . . io7 

iii. the use of spiritual endowments io9 
iv. the use of opportunities of 

SERVICE 113 

v. the labour not in vain . . ii 8 

The Good Samaritan 

i. who is my neighbour? . . .123 

ii. the spirit of neighbourliness . 127 

iii. priest and samaritan . . . i3i 

iv. unselfish service . . . i36 

v. thorough service . ^ . . . i38 

VI. PERSONAL SERVICE . . . .139 



CONTENTS 



XI 



The Barren Fig-Tree 

I. THE divine disappointment . . 1 43 

II. conventional CHRISTIANITY . . 1 47 

iii. the pleading of christ . . 1 49 

iv. abiding in christ . . . . i50 

The Unjust Steward 

i. a story of worldly acuteness . 1 59 
ii. god or mammon . . . . 160 
iii. the secret of religious success . 1 64 
iv. the use of the mammon of un- 
righteousness . . . .166 
v. a discipline of fidelity . . . 168 
vi. a friend in the eternal taber- 
NACLES 172 

The Unprofitable Servants 

i. the sense of duty . . . i77 
ii. the limitations of the sense of 

DUTY 182 

in. THE NEED OF AN INWARD IDEAL . 1 85 

iv. the infinite claim of god . . 1 86 

v. the perfect sense of duty . . 1 89 

The Friend at Midnight and the Unjust 
Judge 

i. from man to god . . . .193 

ii. the justice of god . . . i97 

iii. the fatherhood of god . . 1 99 

v. the importunity of prayer . . 200 

v. the need of intercessory prayer 207 



Xll 



CONTENTS 



The Friend at Midnight and the Unjust 
Judge — continued 
vi. the cry of the tempted 
vii. the cry of the church militant 

The Pharisee and the Publican 

I. THE sense of sin . 

ii. our lord^s treatment of sin 

iii. god as law .... 

iv. god as life .... 

v. god as love .... 

The Prodigal Son 

i. the gospel within the gospel . 
ii. the departure from home . 
iii. the sojourn in the far country 

iv. the return 

v. the reconciliation 
vi. the elder son .... 



211 
214 



219 
222 
225 
227 
228 



235 
237 
241 
245 
249 
255 



The Lost Sheep 

I. the severity of the parables 

.11. THE ETERNAL COMPASSION 
m. THE SHEPHERD SEEKS 
IV. THE SHEPHERD FINDS 
fcV. THE SHEPHERD REJOICES 



263 
265 
268 
271 
273 



THE USE OF PARABLES IN THE 
TEACHING OF JESUS 



THE USE OF PARABLES IN THE 
TEACHING OF JESUS 

The use of parables was the special mark 
of Jesus' popular teaching — "without a 
parable spake He not unto them." It is 
easy to see the fitness of this kind of teach- 
ing (i) It was a method to which His 
hearers were accustomed. Orientals are 
born story-tellers; their common speech is 
proverbial and parabolic. Teaching other- 
wise clothed would have been unreal, inac- 
cessible to them. Our Lord when He came 
among men came not outwardly as a marvel, 
but as a brother, moving freely among the 
people with whom He lived and of whom, 
"as concerning the flesh," He came, using 
their customary ways of thinking and 



4 PARABLES OF JESUS 

speaking. He taught men in their own lan- 
guage; taught as a Rabbi, differing from 
other Rabbis, not in His method, but in the 
originality, the force, the strange and com- 
pelling authority which He showed in His 
use of it. (2) It was a method which 
arrested attention. You must always have 
clear in your imagination the scene of each 
parable — the Teacher standing there with 
the burden of truth upon His heart, and the 
crowd before Him; and remember what a 
crowd of men, a thing always so wonderful 
must have meant to the Son of Man. Well, 
He must make them listen. With the sym- 
pathy and earnestness of the true Teacher 
He would swiftly and spontaneously use the 
suggestions of the moment — things passing 
before the eyes of His audience, familiar in 
their daily life, the ways of husbandman and 
housewife, the tales and news of the country- 
side — and thus catch and keep their atten- 
tion. (3) It was a method which aroused 
thought. The great Teacher knew that He 
could not teach His hearers unless He made 
them teach themselves. He must reach 



THE USE OF PARABLES 5 

their own minds and get them to work with 
His. The form of the parable would attract 
all; but only the thoughtful could read its 
meaning. It could not be found without 
thinking. The parables therefore both 
attracted and sifted the crowd. Those only 
who ^'had ears" could hear — those only who 
were in earnest would either care or come to 
understand. (4) Hence it was a method 
which preserved the truth. What men 
think out for themselves they never forget; 
the exercise of their mind makes it their 
own. Moreover the language of symbols — 
expressed in what is seen by the eye or 
pictured by the imagination — is more 
powerful and enduring in its effects than 
the language of mere abstract words. It 
conveys and brings back to the mind the 
inner meaning with swiftness and sureness; 
it carries with it a wealth of suggestion and 
association. And mere words are constantly 
changing their meaning, whereas the sym- 
bols of Life and Nature such as our Lord 
used in His parables are as abiding as Na- 
ture and Life themselves. 



6 PARABLES OF JESUS 

Among all the teachers who have used 
this method of teaching, Jesus stands un- 
rivalled. There is nothing in literature 
which can be compared with His parables. 
How familiar they are, yet how everlast- 
ingly fresh! Interwoven with all the mem- 
ories of our lives, wrought into the texture 
of our daily speech, they yet retain a force 
and vividness wholly their own. So simple 
in form that a child may understand them, 
they are yet so deep in meaning that Chris- 
tian thought for nearly two thousand years 
has pondered over them without exhausting 
their treasures. The criticism of the 
Gospels, historical and literary, which has 
in so many ways changed and disturbed (as 
well as deepened) our knowledge of the 
life and words of Christ, leaves these stories 
for the most part untouched. No one can 
doubt that in studying them we are quite 
literally studying the very words of Jesus. 
They bear the mark of personality, the 
stamp of unique and incommunicable 
genius. They bring us to Him who spoke 
as man has never spoken. 



THE USE OF PARABLES 7 

From these thoughts two principles 
spring which shall guide our study. The 
first is, we must remember that each parable 
was spoken not primarily to unborn genera- 
tions, but to living groups of bystanders and 
disciples. It had a single special lesson, 
meant for them, which they could under- 
stand. That primary lesson must always be 
our first concern. It must remain the touch- 
stone of the worth of all our own interpreta- 
tions. They must be consistent with it. No 
detail must be pressed to teach something 
plainly outside its limits. Thus (to quote 
familiar and egregious instances of a method 
only too common in all ages of Christian 
teaching) to see in some of the details of 
the story of the Good Samaritan a proof of 
the order of process in the Fall of Man, and 
an anticipation of the institution of the two 
great sacraments; to look upon the story of 
the Unjust Steward as a history of the 
apostasy of Satan; to discern in the Pearl of 
Great Price a description of the Church of 
Geneva — this is to ignore the unity of mean- 
ing given by our Lord Himself in the im- 



8 PARABLES OF JESUS 

mediate lesson which He was impressing on 
His immediate audience, and to make inter- 
pretation fanciful, artificial, even violent. 
On the other hand — and this is our second 
principle of study — He who spoke these 
parables was the Son of God and the Son of 
Man — the Word of God incarnate. How- 
ever simple His words may have been they 
had in them the width and depth of the 
Truth itself. We shall therefore expect that 
the main lesson of each parable will carry 
us far, if we have power to follow it, into 
the deep things of life and God — nay, that 
the details will possess in relation to this 
main lesson a significance of their own. The 
parables will soon lead us to the mysteries of 
the Kingdom of God. We may even see "a 
mystery" in the very use of the parables by 
the Word Incarnate — the truth, namely, 
that the connection between the parable and 
the lesson is not merely accidental; that it 
corresponds to some inner harmony of 
thought and things. I cannot do better than 
quote the words of Archbishop Trench 
(whose introduction to the study of the 



THE USE OF PARABLES 9 

parables in spite of the lapse of years since 
it was written remains unique, full of 
scholarship, insight and beauty) : ^'This en- 
tire moral and visible world from first to 
last, with its kings and its subjects, its par- 
ents and its children, its sun and its moon, 
its sowing and its harvest, its light and its 
darkness, its sleeping and its waking, its 
birth and its death, is from beginning to end 
a mighty parable, a great teaching of super- 
sensuous truth . . . Christ moved in the 
midst of what seemed to the eye of sense an 
old and worn-out world, and it evidently be- 
came new at His touch; for it told to man 
now the inmost secrets of his being, an- 
swered with strange and marvellous corres- 
pondences to another world within him, 
helped to the birth great thoughts of his 
heart, which before were helplessly strug- 
gling to be born — these two worlds, without 
him and within, each throwing a light and 
a glory on the other." 

Jesus was man and God; His parables 
were simple, suited to the men He met on 
earth, yet were they also glimpses of truth 



lo PARABLES OF JESUS 

deep and divine. May the Holy Spirit of 
God, the Giver of Life, through our study 
of them, make these venerable stories of 
Jesus live anew in our minds and lives! 



THE SOWER 



THE SOWER 

S. Matt, xiii. 3-8, 18-23; S. Mark Iv. 3-8, 14-20; 
S. Luke viii. 5-8, 11-15 



I. THE SEED IS THE WORD 

We begin with the great Parable of the 
Sower. It is the story with which Jesus 
Himself seems to have ushered His para- 
bolic method of teaching. It is the one 
which He gave as a type of all the rest, and 
concerning which He laid down the reasons 
which led Him to choose this way of reach- 
ing the hearts and consciences of His 
hearers. It is easy for us to imagine the 
scene of its first telling. Around the Master 
were the blue waters of the lake; before 
Him, on the fringe of bright yellow sand, 
stood the crowd of Eastern peasants, eager 



14 PARABLES OF JESUS 

to hear the new Teacher, so unlike the 
formal and precise Rabbis to whom they 
were accustomed, as He sat there in the 
freshness and freedom of the open air. It 
may be that as he raised His glance, it fell 
upon some countryman on the slope of the 
hill behind the beach, sowing his seed, the 
birds flying around and behind him. That 
sight interpreted to Jesus with swift vivid 
reality His own immediate situation — His 
presence there, meeting His brother men, 
with the message of their Father on His 
lips, the love of their Father in His heart; 
these faces before Him, each of them repre- 
senting some separate story of toil, of love, 
of hope, of need, of sorrow. "Behold! the 
sower went forth to sow." 

How could He make the words which 
came from His own very life become the 
germs of new and satisfying life in all these 
waiting folk? He knew that all depended 
, upon the receptivity of the soil — on the dis- 
position of the heart and mind. At the out- 
set of our study of the parables, let us lay to 
heart that first and essential lesson. We shall 



THE SOWER 15 

make no progress in this or any other 
branch of Christian learning until we have 
grasped it. The Divine Teacher requires 
the right correspondence of heart and will. 
Truth cannot be known, grace cannot be re- 
ceived, without the fitting response of char- 
acter. The message of Christian truth will 
never prove itself, the gift of Christian 
grace will never fulfil itself. To under- 
stand the first and to use the second really and 
vitally, a man must put and keep himself in 
the right attitude of mind and will. The 
object of the parable is to tell us what that 
right attitude is. 

The seed is ^'the word," "the word of 
God," "the word of the Kingdom." The 
sower is the Living Spirit of God who 
breathes the word. The Spirit, like the 
wind, blows where He lists; and every 
breath of that Divine Spirit is a word of 
God. The language in which He speaks is 
manifold, unexpected, all-pervading as 
Himself. Whenever the spirit of a man is 
touched and aroused, a word of God has 
been spoken. Sometimes it is spoken 



i6 PARABLES OF JESUS 

through Nature in the glory of the setting 
sun, in the plash of the waters upon the 
shore, in the shapes and shadows of great 
mountains, in the multitude and silence of 
the stars, in the stillness of the "huge and 
thoughtful night.'^ Sometimes the word is 
spoken through human lives — as when the 
example of a true man or woman warms the 
heart and fires the will, or when some spec- 
tacle of suffering quickens the instinct of 
compassion. Sometimes the word is spoken 
through memories of days and faces gone, 
through old associations rousing remorse, or 
reviving forgotten hopes. Sometimes it is 
spoken when some chord of music stirs 
strange yearnings in the soul and inarticu- 
late "thoughts too deep for tears." Some- 
times it speaks again to our own spirits with 
some echo of the power or pleading with 
which centuries ago it first sounded in the 
spirit of God's chosen men, when we read 
and hear the venerable words of the Bible. 
Has the inner spirit of a man at any time 
and in any way been reached and drawn to- 
wards good and God? — Then and there 



THE SOWER 17 

God has been speaking to him. Once indeed 
the Spirit of God expressed Himself in a 
Perfect Word — in the Word of God incarn- 
ate; and still the surest sign which a man 
can have that God Himself is speaking to 
Him is when the thought of Jesus moves 
him to grateful reverence, the example of 
Jesus inspires him to the service of his fel- 
lows, the Spirit of Jesus gives him the 
ardour of hope, and the strength of life. In 
all these manifold ways the Spirit of God 
is ceaselessly speaking divine words — the 
Sower is ever going forth to sow. 

Whether or not these words of God enter 
within us as life-giving seeds, springing up 
in healthy and progressive life, and bearing 
fruit, depends upon the quality of the soil. 
It is this which we have to examine and 
prepare. This is the essential ^^spade 
work" of the Christian life. 

II. THE WAYSIDE SOIL 

Some seed fell upon the wayside soil. 
On the pathway trodden hard by the feet 



i8 PARABLES OF JESUS 

of men, the scattered seed finds no entry. 
It lies upon the surface, and the birds 
which fly in the wake of the sower pick it 
up and carry it away. The wayside soil 
is the type of the hardened heart, (i) The 
heart is hardened often by the routine of 
daily life, monotonous and persistent. Work 
we must have; hard work it is well for us 
to have; but if work is to ennoble and not 
enslave, the inner spirit of the worker must 
be' kept free, otherwise the whole life is 
pressed down, becomes hard and flat, 
narrow and barren. You remember that 
epitaph, so significant of the common fail- 
ures of life, ^^Born a man, he died a grocer." 
"The daily round, the common task," are 
indeed "a road to bring us daily nearer 
God." But they are this only when the 
road is continually broken up by the free 
movement of His Spirit. There are three 
simple ways of preventing this hardening 
of the heart by the routine of life. One is 
Prayer. It is busy, hard-working men who 
have most need of the daily prayer. The 
habit of prayer keeps the character moist 



THE SOWER 19 

with the dews of heaven, open and respon- 
sive to the seed-words of God. The second 
is the right observance of the weekly 
Sabbath — the rest for recreation: the pause, 
regularly enforced in the pressure of work, 
in which a man makes time to remember 
the Lord his God, and in the worship of 
the Church to enter another and a higher 
world. And these two are in close connec- 
tion. For — 

"Every day should leave some part 
Free for a Sabbath of the heart: 
So shall the seventh be truly blest 
From morn to eve with hallowed rest." 

The third is the momentary recollection 
of God in the midst of daily work — as it is 
quaintly called, ^^the practice of the Presence 
of God.'* You remember one Brother 
Lawrence, the monastery cook, who in the 
duties of the kitchen, by this means 
"possessed God in tranquillity." These 
momentary upliftings of the soul to God, 
in shop and factory, in street and railway, 
keep the soil from hardening and make it 
responsive to the words of God. 



20 PARABLES OF JESUS 

(2) The heart is often hardened by the 
familiarity of religious language. The 
accustomed phrases fall on our ears or rise 
to our lips with dangerous facility. Unless 
they are constantly questioned and tested, 
they become a mere hardening patter of 
words. You have sung that hymn — you 
have heard that sentence in a sermon — 
you have used these phrases in your family 
prayers. Ask: ^What does this really 
mean to me?" It is often a good thing to 
think quietly for five minutes about the tre- 
mendous import of the simplest phrases of 
religion. ^Trom all hardness of heart and 
contempt of Thy word and commandment, 
good Lord, deliver us." 



III. THE THIN-SURFACED SOIL 

Some seed fell upon the thin- surfaced 
soil. Where there is a mere layer of earth 
covering a hard rock, the seed cannot 
spread downwards and take strong root, 



THE SOWER 21 

and its growth is both sudden and short- 
lived. 'Those on the rock are they which 
when they have heard receive the word 
with joy; and these have no root, which 
for a while believe and in time of tempta- 
tion fall away." In the pregnant phrase 
of S. Luke, ''they have no root in them- 
selves." Alas! there is here for very many 
of us the need of anxious self-testing. Has 
our religion any real root in ourselves? It 
may be that our religious emotions are quick 
and warm; that our interest in religious or 
ecclesiastical matters is intense. It may 
be that we have even gone through, to us, 
memorable religious experiences. All these 
things are good in their ovv^n way; but they 
are only surface matters. The Word of God 
can find no soil in which to take root there. 
It must get down to a man's ^ui:ill; for his 
inner self is what he is ■■n'illing to be. Unless 
religion is conceived as an obligation — a 
power which reaches, grasps, and holds the 
will^ — it cannot stand the strain of life. 

There comes perhaps the temptation to 
grow tired of moral drudgery — the long 



22 PARABLES OF JESUS 

and weary task of daily self-discipline, of 
clearing out some besetting fault. It is 
tedious and depressing, assuredly; and the 
feelings of religion can apparently maintain 
themselves without it; why take so much 
pains about it? Yet it is scarcely too much 
to say that two-thirds of true practical re- 
ligion is just this drudgery of daily dis- 
cipline. I am convinced it can only be 
faced, maintained, brought out to success by 
a man whose religion has got down to the 
roots of his being, and there more and more 
works with the steadiness and spontaneity 
of a new instinct. 

There comes perhaps the trial of a great 
sorrow. Ah, how common, how pitiful, is 
the spectacle of the withering of religion 
under the blight of suffering! ^'I used 
to enjoy my prayers; I loved my church, its 
sacraments, its services; and now, just when 
I want it most, my religion fails me." Many 
a time have I heard that bitter complaint on 
the lips of those who, when the sun shone, 
were very religious. Doubtless it may be 
failure of nerves rather than failure of faith 



THE SOWER 23 

which accounts for this sense of blankness. 
But too often the reason is that faith has 
not got down to and mingled itself with the 
roots of life — its elementary instincts, its 
enduring characteristics. How different 
these complaints from the words with which 
Jesus, in whom the Father's will was the 
very breath of life, met the coming of His 
Passion — ^Tather, the hour is come, 
glorify Thy Son." 

Or there may come the trial of "persecu- 
tion." We may be sure that our religion 
has only a surface hold when we find that it 
becomes harassed, petulant, distressed in 
the atmosphere of criticism; and criticism 
is the most common modern substitute for 
the older and franker modes of persecution. 
If a man's religion is part of himself— rooted 
in the bases of his being — he will not be 
tossed to and fro by the currents of opinion 
and talk. He may not be able to meet 
argument by argument, he may be baffled 
often in his own reasoning, but the "man 
in him," the real self, will remain unshaken. 

That is the lesson for our learning. 



24 PARABLES OF JESUS ^ 

Religion, if it is to be sure and strong, 
must be pressed down till it reaches and 
grasps a man's inmost self — that self which 
abides the same beneath all changes and 
chances of life and sorrow and doubt. This 
is the radical reform of which the charac- 
ters of most of us stand in urgent need. It 
comes to this — have we any conviction for 
which we are ready to die, /. e,, which we 
could not give up without giving up the 
whole meaning of life? Such a final stand- 
ing-ground Frederic Robertson reached. 
^^In the darkest hours through which a 
human soul can pass, whatever else is doubt- 
ful, this at least is certain — if there is no 
God, no future state, yet even then it is bet- 
ter to be generous than selfish, better to be 
true than false, better to be brave than to be 
a coward." Not much, you may say, but at 
least it was a root which had wrought itself 
into the fibres of the man's whole being. 
Therefore a new strong faith could grow up 
from it — "a faith and hope and trust," as 
he says, "no longer traditional but his own 
— a trust which neither earth nor hell shall 



THE SOVv^ER 25 

shake henceforth for ever." Such a stand- 
ing-ground they reach who know that they 
would rather part with life itself than with 
the conviction which alone to them gives 
life its meaning and its inspiration, the con- 
viction that the inner voice which once 
called them from the drift of indifference 
and set the light of a true ideal before them, 
and since then has cheered and guided them 
in their new journey was the voice of a 
Living Person, Jesus the Lord and Brother 
of men. Rest not satisfied till you have 
found some such holding root of faith. 
Plant it deep in the bases of your life. Test 
its strength by its control over the will. Do 
not despise, but distrust mere feeling; and 
lookto acts as the real proof of your religion. 
For it is by action, more and more- immedi- 
ate and instinctive and quick to obey the 
promptings of faith, that the fibres of faith's 
root become entwined close and strong 
around your inmost self. It is from a 
religon thus deep-rooted that a m_an's 
character brings forth a harvest for God's 
gathering. 



26 PARABLES OF JESUS 



IV. THE CHOKED SOIL 

Again, there is the choked soil — the soil 
in which the alien growths of the cares and 
pleasures of life choke and strangle the 
growth of God's seed. 

^'Other seed fell amidst the thorns: and 
the thorns grew with it and choked it." 
''These are they that have heard and as they 
go on their way they are choked with cares 
and riches and pleasures of this life, and 
bring no fruit to perfection" (S. Luke vii. 
7, 114). Here, you will notice, the fault is 
not with the soil itself: it has great possi- 
bilities: it is rich and deep enough, but it 
wants weeding. It wastes its strength in 
nourishing the weeds. It is not enough that 
the seed should find a root: it must have 
room to grow. 

( I ) It is very noteworthy that our Lord 
expressly puts ''the care of this world," 
"the care of this life," among the thorns 
which strangle the growth of the true life, 
By "care" He means, not quiet and 



THE SOWER 27 

purposeful thought, but that division of the 
heart (such is the force of the Greek word) , 
that over-pressing anxiety, that fretting, 
which exhausts the energies of life. How 
hard it is for any '^fruits of the Spirit" to 
grow up in the midst of this fretting care 
any knowledge of the lives of the masses of 
our labouring folk abundantly shows. I do 
not think I can do better than quote the 
following words from the recent striking 
charge of the Bishop of Southwark (then 
Bishop of Rochester).* 'The great French 
preacher, Lacordaire, discussing the salva- 
tion of the many or the few, declared that 
the great mass of mankind would find their 
salvation through toil. But there is another 
side to the matter; the sociologist will also 
tell you that compulsory exertion in the 
form of excessive and protracted labour 
blunts and stunts all the faculties — and our 
appeal is to one of the most sensitive and 
delicate of these faculties — man's moral and 
spiritual sense. . . . When we have made 

* "The Church's Failure and the Work of Christ," 
p. 24. 



28 PARABLES OF JESUS 

the most of the blessings of drudgery and of 
occupied hands, we must still feel that this 
heavy mechanical overstrain of task-work 
yields but little of that which should 
quicken and instruct the best interests of 
man and draw his heart to God." No one 
can doubt that the patience, the cheerful- 
ness, the neighbourliness of the hard-work- 
ing poor betoken a true and rich soil of 
human nature, but its capacities are strained 
and exhausted by this all-compelling ^^care." 
I was much struck by the remark made to 
me not long ago by a good working-man — 
^'You wonder why the likes of me take so 
little thought for religion. Well, the fact 
is, we are mostly tired out." The good soil 
is "tired out": it becomes incapable of 
moral and spiritual eifort. The energies of 
the soul cannot stand the double strain. 
Every effort, therefore, to lighten the pres- 
sure of toil, to make work more interesting 
in itself, shorter in its duration, more as- 
sured of its wage, makes for religion. 

And yet it remains true that the Gospel is 
very specially meant for tired folk, for the 



THE SOWER 29 

weary and heavy laden. It is to them a 
gift of rest — the rest, the freedom from fret, 
which comes with a tranquil trust in the 
constant love of God. By that trust the 
spirit rises to the calm of the Divine Will ; 
it is there refreshed and strengthened, and 
thence it returns to the toil and spreads its 
own tranquillity over it. Trust in God's 
care takes the care which is anxious out of 
the heart of toil, — "casting all your care 
upon Him for He careth for you." That 
patience which is always pathetic becomes 
in God's servants — have we not often seen 
it? — a certain heroic serenity: it speaks of 
triumph rather than endurance, of mastery 
rather than submission. The toil of a man 
whose spirit rises to God and keeps hold on 
Him becomes a discipline which helps, not 
a "care" which strangles, the growth of the 
soul. I am sure that we all, whatever our 
life task may be, have need of renewing that 
primary faith in the reality of Providence. 
The simplicity which really trusts and acts 
upon the truth that life is ordered by the 
Will of God always brings with it calmness 



30 PARABLES OF JESUS 

and strength. "Sit down" said Carlyle's 
father to his sons who rose from the family 
prayers, when a gust of wind shook the 
cottage, to protect the stacks of corn — "sit 
down : there cannot a straw be touched but 
by the Will of God." A simple faith, no 
doubt, and perhaps crudely expressed, but 
the faith by which the "still, strong man" 
is made. 

(2) "The deceitfulness of riches," "the 
pleasures of this life" — these also choke the 
seeds of God. There is even more danger 
in the pursuit of wealth and pleasure than 
in the compulsion of toil. Not even the 
large-hearted Lacordaire could say that 
some men could be saved by their comforts 
or their amusements. The soul is more 
prone to be atrophied by comfort than to 
be worn out by toil. Any honest self- 
scrutiny shows most of us plainly enougH 
the astonishing subtlety and closeness with 
which the little comforts of life entangle the 
spirit. They are innocent in themselves, so 
that we are put off our guard, but in the 
bulk they are very Delilah's cords, and 



THE SOWER 31 

when the spirit is called to make some effort 
or sacrifice it finds itself tied and bound. 
"Come, follow me.'' — '^When he heard this 
he was very sorrowful for he was very rich." 
We know not when or how the summons 
may come to test the strength and freedom 
of the spirit: let us prepare for it by pre- 
venting these comforts of life from becom- 
ing its masters. Let us keep the upper hand 
over them by deliberate acts of self-denial; 
use them, as those who are ready at any 
moment to dispense with them. It is sadly 
true that 'Vocations are missed daily" 
through mere softness of living. The spirit 
cannot work its way through the network 
of comforts which have been allowed to be- 
come indispensable. You do not accuse a 
gardener of spoiling his garden because he 
does some weeding every day. Neither do 
we spoil or thwart life by deliberate rules 
of self-discipline. We only strengthen it and 
maintain its freedom, give room in it for 
the seeds of the spirit to grow. 

I have not spoken of the more absorbing 
"pleasures of this life." It is enough 



32 PARABLES OF JESUS 

simply to say that it is sternly impossible 
for that large class which exists to amuse 
itself and makes pleasure its all-engrossing 
business to ^'save" its soul. Is it too much 
to say that the Thames on a Sunday after- 
noon would be to any eyes which knew the 
truth about human life and its destiny an 
infinitely more pitiful sight than a dingy 
street crowded with white and worn 
toilers? 

(3) But there is a phrase in S. Mark's 
version of the parable which perhaps comes 
nearer to the conscience of most of us. The 
seed is choked by '^the lusts of other 
things entering in" — 'The lusts of other 
things" — the jostle of all sorts of desires and 
impulses. Is it not a phrase descriptive of 
a type of character very common in these 
days? They are days of perpetual move- 
ment, distraction, dissipation of thought and 
energy. Modern character takes its hue 
from this environment. I saw the other day 
a bill on a music-hall door, ^'Lightning 
changes: programme constantly varied." It 
seemed a faithful caricature of our modern 



THE SOWER 33 

life — so hurried, so distracted by a thou- 
sand influences of newspapers, magazines, 
opinions, all of which find some response 
within us. There is, indeed, a very real 
craving for religion — the very restlessness 
of men brings a desire for faith, their very 
nervousness becomes a plea for rest. But 
these promptings of the true spirit, the 
reaching forth of the real needs of the soul, 
are choked by the medley of manifold 
influences and dissipated desires. The 
prophet's warning to our day and genera- 
tion — indeed, to ourselves, for we are all 
influenced by the spirit of the time— must be 
not only ^'Repent," but also very specially 
''Simplify your life/' Go thinning in the 
garden of your soul; select the plants which 
you mean to grow: there is no room for all. 
If we are to be Christians it must be, not by 
custom or even by mere desire and aspira- 
tion, but by the deliberate choice of the will. 
We must choose which of the contending 
claims of business, pleasure, society, ambi- 
tion, Christ, we mean in the last resort to 
prevail. There is no other way of success. 



34 PARABLES OF JESUS 

If we are content with these over- crowded 
characters we shall '^bring no fruit to per- 
fection." If we try to keep both pleasure 
and Christ as our main motives of living, 
we shall lose both. Those who are able to 
learn moral truth through striking paradox 
might read, on this stern law of life, Brown- 
ing's ^'Statue and the Bust" or Kipling's 
^'Tomlinson." The one quite certain way 
of spoiling life is the way of the divided 
v/ill. It is really not worth while to have 
a half-hearted religion, for a half-hearted 
religion (as we shall shall learn from an- 
other parable) spoils not only the service of 
God but also the service of mammon. We 
cannot hope our religion to be either a joy 
to ourselves or a help to others unless and 
until we have settled once for all that the 
Master who has the right of the last word in 
all debates of duty or desire is not self, or 
the world, but Christ. So far as it rests 
with us to make our religion a happiness 
and a power the one thing needful is single- 
heart and sincere choice of it as the supreme 
rule of life. 



THE SOWER 35 



V. THE GOOD SOIL 

For this, says our Lord, is the good soil. 
"That on the good ground are they which 
in an honest and good heart, having heard 
the word, keep it and bring forth fruit with 
patience." "An honest and good heart." 
After all that we have said we are not sur- 
prised at the extreme simplicity of this 
description. To be really sincere towards 
God — that is the great need. Honesty and 
goodness of heart — given these conditions 
in the soil, the Spirit of God can rear His 
seeds. These were the conditions which 
Jesus sought in His first disciples. For the 
most part, they vv^ere simple, honest, open- 
air men — life the fishermen on our own 
coasts, who look at us with straight eyes 
and speak to us with straight words. He 
knew that in their frankness and simplicity 
He had the capacity for response. So He 
could do in them and through them what- 
soever He wished. How often we have 
known gifted but complicated characters, 



36 PARABLES OF JESUS 

who interested us, perhaps fascinated us, 
but who disappointed us because we saw in 
them no progress; and on the other hand, 
simple men with honest hearts, touched by 
the grace of God, who moved straight on in 
tranquil strength. ''Honesty'' : we are to be 
simply honest in the things of religion. It 
was Newman who said that the man who 
was wholly honest was already perfect. For 
if a man is really and truly surrendered to 
the Divine Will, so that his whole nature is 
expressed in the prayer, ^'Speak Lord for 
Thy servant heareth," ^^Here am I, send 
me," then the Spirit of God has free course 
within him. ''Goodness'': we are to have a 
great ambition to be ''good," to hate and 
despise as by a strong instinct all mean- 
nesses, inconsistencies, jealousies; to be as 
self-less and absorbed in the quest of good- 
ness as the child is in his play. For what 
is this honesty and goodness of heart but 
the spirit of the child? We are always 
brought back to that great condition of 
entry into the Kingdom of God— "be con- 
verted and become as little children." In 



THE SOWER 37 

proportion as we are thus open to the Spirit 
of God we shall grow — grow gradually 
towards the likeness of Christ. It is for 
God to choose how full the growth shall be, 
how rich in the graces of character, in the 
power of influence — ^^some an hundred fold, 
some sixty fold, some thirty fold.'' It is 
enough that we oppose no obstacle to His 
spirit. He will bring forth the fruit in due 
season. 

Lord, I am nothing in myself : my worth 
is only what Thou canst make me to be. 
Make me to love what Thou lovest, will 
what Thou wiliest, desire what Thou de- 
sirest, serve where Thou sendest, be ready 
when Thou callest. 

If such a prayer come from the heart, as 
the expression of real purpose and desire, 
the heart from which it comes is the good 
soil. 



THE MUSTARD SEED AND THE 
LEAVEN 



THE MUSTARD SEED AND THE 
LEAVEN 

S. Matt, xiii. 31-33; S. Mark iv. 30-32; 
S. Luke xiii. 18-21 



I. THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE 
KINGDOM 

"The Kingdom of Heaven"— "The 
Kingdom of God" — what is it? The 
parables describe its characteristics, its 
modes of operation and fulfilment. We 
must try to form some clear conception as 
to what it meant in the mind of Jesus. The 
subject demands a treatise — not a para- 
graph. For its fuller treatment by English 
writers I can only refer to such books as 
those of F. D. Maurice, of Dr. A. B. Bruce, 
of Dr. Stanton, or of the Bishop of Exeter. 

41 



42 PARABLES OF JESUS 

For "the Kingdom" the whole experience 
of the Old Testament was a preparation; 
in "the Kingdom" was summarized the 
whole teaching of Jesus; from "the King- 
dom" have come all the best and truest 
energies of human life; towards "the King- 
dom" in its full realization, moves the course 
of the world. Our Lord Himself never 
gave a definition of His Kingdom; and we 
cannot presume to speak where He was 
silent. To define a conception so wide and 
deep would be to isolate some aspect of it 
and thus give to that single aspect an undue 
importance. The history of the Christian 
religion is full of instances of this danger. 
Some, for example, have identified the 
Kingdom with the visible, organized 
Church; others have declared that it is 
exclusively an inward principle. Our Lord 
was content to select a phrase striking and 
easily remembered, a phrase which gathered 
up the spiritual history of His people; to 
repeat it, after His manner, over and over 
again in different contexts, and thus to leave 
it in the minds of His hearers as the centre 



MUSTARD SEED AND LEAVEN 43 

of many thoughts and associations. But 
though it is impossible to define "the King- 
dom of Heaven," we may perhaps, without 
injustice to any of its aspects, describe it as 
simply the true life — the life which is in 
free and full accord with the will of God. 
Our Lord speaks of it in relation sometimes 
to its inherent qualities of growth and ex- 
pansion ; sometimes to its moral and spiritual 
characteristics; sometimes to its sources and 
means of sustenance; sometimes to its out- 
ward forms. But in whatever context the 
phrase occurs it always denotes something 
vital, energetic, progressive. It is the life 
which He Himself as "Son of Man" em- 
bodied and manifested; the life which, by 
His words. His example. His spirit, He 
communicated to His brethren; the life 
which came from Him by a new birth to the 
spirit of man, and springing up there flowed 
out into all the energies of his body and 
soul; the life with which His Spirit en- 
dowed the "body," the community of His 
Church, and with which that Church should 
in its turn inspire and transform all 



44 PARABLES OF JESUS 

humanity. This is the Kingdom of Heaven 
— an inward vital energy moving out from 
the King's Spirit, uniting His subjects to 
the King's self and to each other in the fel- 
lowship of a community, inspiring and en- 
abling them to do on earth the King's will. 
Is there not need of reviving this con- 
ception of the vital, the dynamic character 
of the Kingdom of God? Has not our 
^^Churchmanship," i.e., our membership in 
the visible "organ" of the Kingdom, become 
something stifT, immobile ; a means of satis- 
fying the conscience, rather than of stirring 
the will? We profess the faith which the 
Church keeps. We attend dutifully the 
services which it provides. We even receive 
obediently the Sacraments which it dis- 
penses. We commend and possibly sub- 
scribe to the work which it undertakes. But 
are we conscious of the thrill of its life, as we 
are of the spring on an April morning? Are 
we kindled by the warmth of its spiritual 
energy to the flame of sacrifice and service? 
I know well that such questions as these 
even exaggerated — they suggest the arti- 



MUSTARD SEED AND LEAVEN 45 

ficial eloquence of the pulpit rather than 
any real facts of life. Probably there is not 
one out of any ten professing ^^Churchmen'' 
who is accustomed to think of the Church 
as having a life, a corporate energy, of its 
own. It is simply an institution. If they 
think of its life and energy, they think 
primarily not of spiritual forces which 
move and act through it, but rather of its 
^'business" as an active institution. In 
thinking of the family most men know that 
it has a life of its own, a life of memories, of 
associations with the living and the dead, of 
influences subtle and far-reaching, moving, 
so to say, "in the blood"— a life lying behind 
and animating the outward activities and 
characteristics of its members. In thinking 
of the State, though perhaps less readily, 
most men know that it too has a great hid- 
den life of its own, a spirit which links the 
past and the present, an abiding energy 
which in times of national crisis emerges 
with surprising force; a set of instincts, of 
moral and intellectual qualities which de- 
termine its place among other States in the 



46 r PARABLES OF JESUS 

world's history — a life as real though not so 
obvious as its immediate political activities. 
But, strange to say, in regard to ^'the 
Church," most men have singularly little 
effective belief that it is in itself a living 
organism, a body in which the Spirit of God 
dwells, which possesses, springing from 
Him as their source, its own spiritual ener- 
gies and powers, by means of which ^'the 
Kingdom of God" is ever coming into this 
world. Restrained indeed and hindered that 
intrinsic spiritual life of the Church is by 
the divisions, inconsistencies, worldliness of 
its members. But faith in its reality would 
surely bring the tokens of its power. The 
true ^^Churchman" is not only one who lives 
for his Church, but one in whom his Church 
lives, inspiring and animating him with the 
energies of the Kingdom of God. 

In the parables of the mustard seed and 
of the leaven, our Lord describes the way 
in which the Kingdom influences men. 
They are closely related, but yet distinct. 
The former describes the outvv^ard signs of 
the vital energies of the Kingdom, the latter 



MUSTARD SEED AND LEAVEN 47 

the mode of their inward working. Both 
are alike in this, that they seem primarily to 
refer to the Church as the visible ^^organ," 
through which the Kingdom affects the 
history and life of the world. The definite- 
ness of the seed and of the leaven, con- 
taining yet concealing the inward properties 
of life and growth, suggests a definite body. 
Just as physical life, of which we can tell 
neither the origin nor the destiny, has its 
organ in the body; just as within the body 
the faculty of thought which we cannot 
really explain, finds its organ in the brain; 
so the Kingdom of Heaven, which is 
nevertheless wide as the scope of the Spirit 
of God, finds its special organ in the 
Church. In these two parables we see 
the outward sign and the inward process 
of the life of the Church in the world. 



II. THE MUSTARD SEED 

^'The Kingdom of Heaven is like unto 
a grain of mustard seed, which a man took 



48 PARABLES OF JESUS 

and sowed in his field; which indeed is less 
than all seeds: but when it is grown it is 
greater than the herbs, and becometh a 
tree, so that the birds of the heaven come 
and lodge in the branches thereof." (S. 
Matt. xiii. 31, 32). "Small as a mustard 
seed" was a proverbial expression, common 
in popular speech. But with its smallness, 
men also noted its qualities of heat, of 
strength, and of healing. It may be that 
as Jesus spoke He could point to some 
mustard tree among whose branches the 
birds were sitting. It was an illustration 
of the contrast between first beginnings and 
final endings, of the powers of growth 
which lie hid in first beginnings if only they 
are inherently sound and strong. 

(i) Surely this parable must have come 
back to the minds of the friends of Jesus 
with encouragement when, as a small body 
of obscure and despised men, they were 
bidden to go into all the world and make 
disciples of all nations. And to us too who 
look back upon the long and chequered 
history of the Church, the fulfilment of 



MUSTARD SEED AND LEAVEN 49 

its prophetic truth is always encouraging. 
Dr. Lightfoot used to say that the study 
of history was the best cordial for drooping 
spirits. But the study which cheers is that 
which takes a wide view over long periods. 
When we look round at the position of the 
Christian Church in our country to-day, 
and note its divisions, its failures, the vast 
masses who stand outside it, depression 
comes over us. But when we look back 
at the position of the Christian Church, say 
a hundred years ago, courage returns. We 
see in the main real advance; we see signs 
everywhere of that astonishing power of 
revival of which the Church alone among 
human institutions seems to possess the 
secret; we are convinced that a power 
more than human is necessary to account 
for this persistent capacity to survive abuses 
so glaring, failures so overwhelming, sloth 
so inveterate. The encouragement grows 
the further back we cast our glance. It 
reaches the point of buoyant faith when, 
down the long and confused vista of the 
centuries, across the bewildering picture of 



50 PARABLES OF JESUS 

the rise and fall of powerful nations and 
great ideas, our eyes reach the first century 
of the Christian era. Then we realize that 
the institution which seems then to be 
the very feeblest, the company of fanatical 
believers in a crucified Jew, ridiculed and 
persecuted, is the only one which has sur- 
vived the shocks and convulsions of these 
nineteen hundred years. The mere survival 
of the Church proves that there is that 
within it against which ^'the gates of hell" 
cannot prevail — an inherent, indestructible 
vitality which comes from the indwelling 
Spirit of Him ^Who is the Resurrection 
and the Life." Thus when the Church 
is taunted by its critics to-day with its 
divisions, its loss of numbers or worldly 
influence, or intellectual strength, its patent 
inconsistencies, it will note, and if it can 
will remedy, its defects, but it will also 
quietly say, "Graviora passi" — ^*I have 
survived greater calamities than these" — 
and will fare forth upon its way in faith. 

(2) The parable interprets to the Church 
not only its general course in history, but 



MUSTARD SEED AND LEAVEN 51 

the mode of its successive revivals. They 
have always, like the mustard tree, grown 
from small beginnings. The history of the 
first group in the upper-chamber at Jeru- 
salem has been repeated over and over 
again; a few devoted men, inspired by the 
Holy Spirit, have been the seed of great 
and surprising developments. Think of 
the little band of monks who landed with 
Augustine on the shores of Thanet; of 
S. Columba and his handful of followers 
who rested their weary oars at lona; of 
S. Francis and his first few '^poor brothers'^ ; 
of Charles and John Wesley, with their 
fellow-students following their "method'' 
of life at Oxford; and remember what 
great developments grew from such small 
beginnings. They were known to the 
Providence of God, but scarcely imagined 
or imaginable by men w^hen the seed 
was sown. It is this thought which in- 
vests the first faint and apparently fruitless 
efforts of the missionaries of the Kingdom 
in distant lands and among strange nations 
with something more than pathos — with 



52 PARABLES OF JESUS 

the light of great hope and clear faith. It 
may almost be said that no great revival or 
extension of the Christian Church has 
arisen except from small and even obscure 
beginnings. The conspicuous and dramatic 
conversion of Constantine, the baptism, in- 
tensely moving as it must have been at the 
time, of whole nations — these were the 
seeds not of progress, but of degeneration. 
Movements which have in them the promise 
of a great future seldom spring into im- 
mediate success. A church discloses the 
possibility of great things to come, when it 
is, so to say, in a state of germinating rather 
than when it is in a state of mere outward 
success and influence. There is a promise 
of the future in a church where there are 
bands of men, however small, who are 
framing great ideals and making ventures 
for them, where the old men still dream 
dreams and the young men are not ashamed 
to see visions; where new enthusiasms are 
met not by suspicion but by sympathy, by 
the wisdom which waits to see whether they 
be of God. On the other hand a church is 



MUSTARD SEED AND LEAVEN 53 

surely forfeiting its claim upon the future, 
however impressive its display of mere 
power or mechanical unity may be for the 
moment, when it arrests new movements 
and stamps them out with iron feet. There 
is therefore warning as well as encourage- 
ment in the parable of the mustard seed. 
Let us take both to heart. 



III. THE LEAVEN 

'The Kingdom of Heaven is like unto 
leaven which a woman took and hid in three 
measures of meal, till it was all leavened" 
(S. Matt. xiii. 33). The parable of the 
mustard seed illustrates the outward signs 
of the life of the Kingdom; that of the 
leaven, the method of its inward working. 
Its influence passes always from within, 
outward. The leaven contains within itself 
hidden qualities of expansion and penetra- 
tion; as soon as it is lodged within the 



54 PARABLES OF JESUS 

foreign substance, these qualities at once 
operate, till the whole is leavened. Thus 
the life of the Kingdom, in the soul or in 
the world, possesses an inward vitality and 
energy which at once and with increasing 
force diffuse their influence. 



IV. THE KINGDOM IN THE SOUL 

Consider the truth first in its relation 
to the individual soul. When "the grace 
of God" — which is nothing else than the 
infused life of the Christ — is fully and 
honestly taken into the soul, it quietly and 
inevitably penetrates and transforms all the 
capacities and energies of the character. 
But its law of growth is from within, out- 
ward. How often we attempt to reverse 
the process! In our desires to live rightly, 
as we say, "to be good," we begin at the 
circumference of life — business, daily 
habits, intercourse with others. We make 
resolutions and frame rules to control this 
outward life of conduct; and we think that 



MUSTARD SEED AND LEAVEN 55 

this dutiful, regulated out\vard life will 
somehow pass its virtue into the inner soul. 
Now it is of course right that we should thus 
bring all our outward life into order; but 
the rules and resolutions must be the result, 
the expression, of the inward life. It is the 
old lesson w^hich S. Paul learned in the bit- 
terness of his own experience and taught 
once for all in his Epistle to the Romans. 
The law cannot give life; life must issue in 
law\ To forget this is to entangle ourselves 
in the struggle and the bondage from which 
S. Paul was set free. We may go on making 
rules and breaking them; making them 
again and striving to keep them better; and 
yet find that even earnest moral struggle re- 
sults in little moral progress and brings us 
no nearer to the sense of freedom. We for- 
get that the first thing is by whole-hearted 
faith and self-surrender to welcome and re- 
spond to the grace of God in the inward 
soul. With all our self-discipline, we must 
begin, continue and end with "conversion." 
Then, if at the centre of our life we are 
really surrendered to God, His grace will 



56 PARABLES OF JESUS 

work its way out to the farthest circumfer- 
ence of our conduct, permeating as it passes 
all our desires and thoughts and interests. 
Learn from the parable of the leaven that 
first and last lesson of the life of the King- 
dom in the soul — that it works from within, 
outward. 

V. THE KINGDOM IN THE WORLD 

But it is with the influence of the King- 
dom upon the world rather than with its 
influence upon the soul that this parable is 
more directly concerned. Yet the law of 
that influence is the same — it moves from 
within outwards. It is well for us in these 
days to remember how wonderfully this law 
was illustrated in the action of the Church 
upon the world in the first ages of the 
Christian era. The leaven was indeed 
hidden, yet surely and steadily its presence 
told. Dean Church, in a passage of singulai 
insight and eloquence, has described the 
process. It is a passage which I at least 
can never read without deep emotion, and 



MUSTARD SEED AND LEAVEN 57 

you will forgive me if I quote it at some 
length. The beginnings of the new morality 
"were scarcely felt, scarcely known of, in 
the vast movement of affairs in the greatest 
of empires. By and by, its presence, 
strangely austere, strangely gentle, strangely 
tender, strangely inflexible, began to be 
noticed. But its work was long only a work 
of indirect preparation. Those whom it 
charmed, those whom it oppressed, those 
whom it tamed, knew not what was being 
done for the generations which were to fol- 
low them. . . . They little thought of what 
was in store for civil and secular society as 
they beheld a number of humble men, many 
of them foreigners, plying their unusual 
trade of preachers and missionaries, an- 
nouncing an external Kingdom of right- 
eousness, welcoming the slave and the out- 
cast as a brother, a brother of the Highest, 
offering hope and change to the degraded 
sinner, stammering of Christ and redemp- 
tion to the wild barbarian, worshipping in 
the catacombs, and meekly burying their 
dead, often their outraged and murdered 



58 PARABLES OF JESUS 

dead, in the sure hope of everlasting peace. 
Slowly, obscurely, imperfectly, most imper- 
fectly, these seeds of blessing for society be- 
gan to ripen, to take shape, to gain power. 
The time was still dark and wintry and 
tempestuous, and the night was long in go- 
ing. It is hard even now to discern there 
the promise of what our eyes have seen. I 
suppose it was impossible then. It rather 
seemed as if the world was driving rapidly 
to its end, not that it was on the eve of its 
most amazing and hopeful transformation." 
These words are the best commentary on 
/ the parable. But do they not rebuke many 
of our modern methods — impatient of deep 
and hidden influence, eager for momentary 
success? Does not the Church to-day stand 
in danger of reversing the true law of influ- 
ence — of seeking to work from without in- 
wards, of busying itself with the circumfer- 
ence instead of perfecting the centre? Con- 
sider the feverish strain or organization, 
the eagerness to adopt methods which en- 
sure popularity or attract numbers, the 
idolatry of indiscriminate energy, which 



MUSTARD SEED AND LEAVEN 59 

mark all the efforts of the Church. Con- 
sider the want of proportion between the 
demand for sanitary, industrial, and social 
reform, and the demand for the deepening 
and strengthening of the spiritual life. The 
extension of the true influence of the Church 
depends upon the intensity of its spirit. 
Even when most conscious of its call to 
affect the whole range of national life, to 
bring within its fold the masses who are 
straying without, the Church must, by re- 
peated acts of recollection, return to the 
great saying of its Lord, ''For their sakes I 
sanctify myself." It is by the depth of in- 
ward life rather than by the width of out- 
ward energy that the Church and its mem- 
bers really and lastingly influence the 
world. 



THE HID TREASURE AND THE 
PEARL OF GREAT PRICE 



THE HID TREASURE AXD THE 
PEARL OF GREAT PRICE 

5. Matt. xiii. 44. 45, 46 

I. THE TRUTH POSSESSED 

The nvo parables of which we have been 
thinking, describe the progress of the 
Kingdom of Heaven in the world. The 
two parables which we are now to consider 
describe the possession of the Kingdom of 
Heaven in the individual soul. The coming 
of the Kingdom is set before us as a per- 
sonal discovery and acquisition of Truth. 
But we are still to carry with us our con- 
ception of the Kingdom as something vital 
and energetic. The Truth which is here 
portrayed as a treasure, as a pearl of great 

63 



64 PARABLES OF JESUS 

price, is Truth in relationship to life. It 
is an inspiration and satisfaction of life — 
an inward energy of faith and power and 
joy. 

This personal possession of the Truth 
which Christ revealed is fitly described 
as the ^^Kingdom of Heaven." For it 
is Truth alone which gives royalty to 
life. Until we have found and grasped 
some Truth which we take as giving for us 
the last word about the meaning of our- 
selves and of God, our life lacks purpose 
and consistency. It is swayed about by 
the events, the impressions, the business, 
the passions, which encounter us. To them 
we are subject: it is Truth alone which 
makes us kings. It gives us the power of 
choosing our own principles of action, of 
ordering and arranging our life in accord- 
ance with them. In this sense the en- 
thronement of Truth within him makes a 
man the ^'master of his destiny." You 
remember the great words of our Lord in 
that brief and wonderful colloquy with 
Pilate. "Thou sayest that I am a King. 



THE HID TREASURE 65 

To this end was I born, and for this cause 
came I into the world that I should bear 
witness unto the Truth. '^ The life of wit- 
ness to the Truth is the royal life. And for 
that reason it is the life of freedom. The 
Truth, said our Lord, shall make you free. 
We are made for freedom. Man's inborn 
freedom is the proof of his royal blood — 
the ^'image of God" in which he was made. 
But when it loses hold upon the Truth it 
becomes self-will, and self-will reveals its 
error by bringing men under the bondage 
of sin. It is only when we discover the 
Truth and make it our own and follow it 
that we recover our freedom. For the pos- 
session of the Truth unites our own will to 
the free and royal Will of Almighty God. 
We enter into "the Kingdom of Heaven." 



11. THE TRUTH ATTAINED BY SACRIFICE 

These two parables are at one in 
presenting this possession of Truth as 



66 PARABLES OF JESUS 

something which demands sacrifice if it is 
to be attained. The men sold all that they 
had in order to secure their discovery. 
When once we have come to take the 
Revelation of Jesus Christ as true, there 
is only one place which it can fill in our 
life — it is the place of supremacy. To 
secure it, to realize it as our own, to enjoy 
its wealth, we must be ready to make any 
sacrifice. We do not possess it if we only 
believe that it exists, or that it is of great 
value. We do not possess it if we only 
discern it — see at times visions of its beauty 
and richness, of all that it might bring into 
our life. We do not possess it even if in 
moments of high emotion we seem to feel 
and know its wealth and power. Posses- 
sion is secured only by sacrifice — sacri- 
fice which is willing to cover the whole 
range of life. We must be willing to sell 
all that we have in order to buy. Is it not 
true — do we not in our conscience know it 
to be true — that the reason why so many 
of us who believe in the truth of our re- 
ligion, who even have glimpses of its won* 



THE HID TREASURE 67 

ders and beauty, and occasional experiences 
of its power, do not really possess it, and are 
not possessed by it, is simply that we have 
not yet made up our minds that for us it is 
to be the supreme thing? It is when we 
stake something for Christ and His Truth, 
stake some inward struggle or outward ser- 
vice that we begin to make sure of our vital 
hold upon Him. Certainly those who stake 
most fully seem always to possess most 
surely. There are men now working in the 
native quarter of Calcutta, in the heart of 
Central Africa, in the crowds of East 
London, who know that the promise of our 
Lord is always fulfilled — ^'There is no man 
that hath left house or parents or brethren 
or wife or children for the Kingdom of 
God's sake who shall not receive manifold 
more in this present time and in the 
world to come life everlasting." Your 
religion will be a possession of happiness 
and power only in proportion as it is 
thorough and thoroughness is tested by 
sacrifice. 



68 PARABLES OF JESUS 



III. THE NATURE OF THE SACRIFICE 

The nature of the Christian sacrifice 
is also explained. It is so sure of the 
supreme worth of its object that it is 
eager and even joyful. It is expressly 
said of the man who found the treasure 
that '^in his joy he goeth and selleth 
all that he hath." If a man has really 
come to see and know the worth of the 
Gospel — that it does bring ^'salvation," 
that sense of inner Tightness in relation 
to God and self and the world, which 
alone can satisfy his life — then the sacri- 
fices which he makes to secure it are 
lifted and lightened by a certain joyful 
ardour. Sacrifice of some sort there must 
be in all human life: it arouses either 
willing acceptance or grudging submission. 
But even the willing sacrifice has two 
kinds. It may be that which bends the 
head, and shuts the lips, and steels 
itself to bear in a proud acknowledg- 
ment of the inevitable. It speaks in 



THE HID TREASURE 69 

the pathetic words of Matthew Arnold, 
bidding us 

* Waive all claim to bliss and try to bear; 
With close-lipped patience for our only friend, 
Sad patience too near neighbour to despair." 

But there is also the sacrifice which is borne 
and even welcomed because it is sustained 
by an uplifting trust in the motives of the 
Power which asks for it, and in the issue 
towards which it tends. It is' always true 
that ^^he who saves his life shall lose it": 
it is not always true that ^'he who loses his 
life shall save it." For he must know and 
trust the ultimate meaning of his loss. Our 
Lord's promise is, ^'He who loses his life 
for My sake and the Gospel's shall save it." 
These additional words take the blindness 
and the bitterness out of sacrifice. S. 
Augustine found' this true in his experience : 
''How delightful did it suddenly become to 
me to lack all frivolous delights, and those 
which I had feared to lose it was now a 
joy to forego. For Thou didst cast them 
from me who art the true and highest 



70 PARABLES OF JESUS 

delight. Thou didst cast them from me 
and enter in their place Who art sweeter 
than every pleasure." Sometimes, indeed, 
the actual pain of the sacrifice is not spared. 
Jesus Himself felt it keenly. But the spirit 
is sustained by the joy of the issue. It is 
said of Jesus that ^^for the joy that was set 
before Him He endured the cross, despis- 
ing the shame." Never without struggle 
can the Kingdom of Heaven be attained: it 
is ^'the violent" who press into it. To the 
outward observer the strain may seem hard 
and severe, but he who knows and trusts 
what he is seeking will find increasingly 
that his faith, his sureness about the worth 
of it all, lifts the weight of his burden and 
lights the darkness of the way, and brings 
even joy into the sacrifice. The spirit 
stands erect even when the head is bowed, 
and the cross of the Christian, like the cross 
of Christ, becomes a throne. 

So far the two parables teach a common 
lesson. But there is a significant difference 
between them, which almost all commen- 
tators have noticed. In the first, the treasure 



THE HID TREASURE 71 

is suddenly and unexpectedly discovered by 
the labourer as he is at work in the field. In 
the second, the pearl of great price is the 
reward of the merchantman's long and 
eager search. The parables thus illustrate 
the two chief ways in which the Kingdom 
of Heaven comes to men. Let us therefore 
consider very shortly each parable by itself. 



IV. THE HID TREASURE 

The labourer is working in the field, ful- 
filling the routine of his daily task. Sud- 
denly his attention is arrested. Perhaps the 
ploughshare turns over with the earth some 
unfamiliar object. The labourer stoops 
down, and he discovers a mass of treasure 
which some one in these unsettled districts 
had buried in the soil for safety. So it has 
often happened in the story of the soul. It 
may be that while the daily life is running 
its usual course suddenly some familiar 
words of the Bible stand out with new clear- 
ness, or arrest the conscience with new force 



72 PARABLES OF JESUS 

and power. The spirit is seized and stirred 
by some new throb of insight or of peni- 
tence. I have known, for example, an in- 
stance in which the truth and wonder of the 
reality of Christ's human nature and sym- 
pathy flashed upon a man as he was almost 
casually reading a description of the boy- 
hood of Jesus. It was hearing the Gospel 
for the day in church which changed the 
whole life of S. Francis of Assisi. Some- 
times a sudden sense of sin and craving for 
the assurance of salvation have pressed in 
upon the soul with overwhelming urgency. 
You remember the life-stories of Bunyan 
and John Newton. Some of you may have 
been spectators of the strange drama of a 
great "revival." Make all allowance for 
the atmosphere of a common excitement, 
for the mysterious influences of the body 
upon the soul; analyze as we will the 
"psychology of conversion," and account as 
we please for the "sub-conscious self" and 
its capacity for sudden emergence into 
activity; yet it is impossible to see or hear of 
these sudden and surprising movements of 



THE HID TREASURE 73 

the soul without a renewed conviction that 
they are also the signs of that Spirit of God 
Who blows where He lists and men cannot 
tell whence He comes and whither He goes, 
and of the deep and ineradicable corres- 
pondence between the need of man and the 
Gospel of Christ. 



V. THE TREASURE AT OUR FEET 

The treasure is hid in the field: it 
is not dropped from the skies. What 
is new and sudden is not the existence 
of the treasure, but the man's discovery of 
it. So in the case of these strange illumina- 
tions and conversions. However sudden 
they may seem, we cannot doubt that all the 
while a preparation has been going on in 
the soul. The impressions of early experi- 
[ences apparently forgotten — recollections, 
it may be, as Wadsworth thought, of some, 
higher and purer world — the patient teach- 
ing, perhaps in childhood, of parent or 
:of pastor — old questionings silenced for the 



74 PARABLES OF JESUS 

time but haunting still the recesses of the 
mind — the unconscious influence of the bap- 
tismal grace, of the unseen Spirit of God — 
all these have been *'hid in the field" of 
character and life. How often we learn 
that some of the most penetrating and en- 
during influences are those which do their 
work in silence and in secret. There is the 
atmosphere of home in early days; there 
are the prayers and thoughts of those who 
watch us with silent eyes of love and care 
both here and surely in the world unseen; 
there is the quietly diffused power of ex- 
ample, of contact with men and women bet- 
ter than ourselves; above all — how strangely 
we forget it! — there is the ceaseless work- 
ing of One Who knows us perfectly and 
loves even as He knows and who wills that 
all should be saved and come to the know- 
ledge of the truth. Never let us neglect for 
ourselves or for others the silent power and 
steady pressure of education, of atmosphere, 
of orderly habits, of religion, of the faithful 
use of appointed "means of grace." The 
treasure must be prepared and hidden be- 



THE HID TREASURE 75 

fore it can be discovered. Let us then 
neither doubt nor presume upon the liberty 
of God's illuminating and converting 
power. 



VI. THE TREASURE FOUND AND HIDDEN 

When the treasure is found, the man 
hides it again. Why? In order that he 
may thoroughly secure his possession of 
it. Not till he has quietly and diligently 
sold all he has and bought the whole 
field is that security his. Thus when any 
sudden illumination or conversion comes, 
men are not to suppose that the treasure is 
at once and wholly their own. They are 
not there and then to drag it forth, to pro- 
claim it upon the house-tops, to shout aloud 
their discovery of it. They are, on the 
contrary, rather to '^hide" it — to show their 
sense of its tremendous value by a reverent 
reserve. Then by diligent self-denial, by 
testing their sincerity, they are to buy up 
and bring under their control the whole 



76 PARABLES OF JESUS 

field of their life and character. Then and 
then only can they dare to say that the new- 
found treasure is their own. Saul of Tarsus 
went from his conversion for three years 
into the deserts of Arabia. 



VII. THE PEARL OF GREAT PRICE 

The Kingdom of Heaven, the possession 
of the Truth as it is in Jesus, comes to men 
not only as a sudden discovery but also 
sometimes as the reward of eager search. 
It is the lifework of the merchantman to 
find ^^goodly pearls," and in the course of 
his travels he finds one of such supreme 
worth that for the sake of it he sells all he 
has and buys it. '^Goodly pearls" are the 
object of the merchant's search. He is a 
type of those who view the world as full of 
possibilities waiting to be realized, full of 
"pearls" of truth and beauty and joy. Life 
presents itself to them as a quest, a voyage 
of discovery. They are never happy in the 
peaceful harbour of routine; they are ever 



THE PEARL OF GREAT PRICE 77 

putting out to sea. Like Tennyson's Ulysses 
they ''cannot rest from travel"; they say, 
with him, — 

"All experience is an arch wherethro' 
Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades 
For ever and for ever when I move." 

This is a spirit in itself right and brave 
and true. He Who made the world and 
rejoices in it, Who has filled it with such 
inexhaustible beauty and mystery, Who has 
endowed us with such powers of feeling and 
of thought, must surely watch with favour 
His merchantmen setting out to seek the 
goodly pearls. It is one of the reasons why 
we should be thankful for the age in which 
we live that there is such a stir of travel in 
the air, such a belief in the wealth which 
life contains. 



VIII. THE QUEST OF THE PEARL 

It is a merchantman who seeks the pearls, 
a man whose search is a business demand- 



78 PARABLES OF JESUS 

ing and receiving care, thoroughness, con- 
centration. It is the weak and disappoint- 
ing side of our modern spirit that it is so 
superficial, so vaguely restless. If we are 
to find "pearls'' we must seek with real 
deliberation and persistence, not as the 
dilettante but as the merchantman. Dr. 
Jowett said once, in one of his pithy 
sermons, "The search for truth is one thing: 
fluttering after it is another." There is too 
much of this vague fluttering in the modern 
spirit. Many people feel the mere seeking, 
travelling, enquiring so interesting that they 
are not seriously concerned about the find- 
ing. We may be sure that in the spiritual 
as in the artistic or scientific life, the mere 
amateur will do no great work and make no 
great discoveries. You will never get an 
answer to your questions unless your heart 
and will are set upon the getting of it. 

IX. THE VALUE OF THE PEARL 

It has often been pointed out that in the 
parable the merchant who is seeking goodly 



THE PEARL OF GREAT PRICE 79 

pearls finds one pearl of great price; and 
that one pearl satisfies the search for many. 
He sells all he has and buys it. This goodly 
pearl of great price is plainly the Truth as 
it is in Jesus. It is presented to us as a 
supreme unity — gathering into itself all the 
truth and beauty which we seek. After all, 
it is only in some unity — some one truth 
which sets the place and value of all others 
— that we can find the satisfaction of the 
spirit's quest. The man of science, unless he 
arbitrarily arrests his journey, must pass 
from the laws whose working he traces, to 
the nature of the whole of which they are a 
part. The artist must seek some relation- 
ship between beauty and truth and good- 
ness. The philosopher must find the cor- 
respondence between truth and life. We 
all need some point of view from which we 
can settle the proportion of all the varied 
elements of our being. It is this single, 
unifying truth which we believe to be given 
us in "the Word made Flesh" — in the union 
of man with God in the person of Jesus 
Christ. It displaces and thrusts out nothing 



8o PARABLES OF JESUS 

that the mind of man can truly know or the 
senses of man can rightly feel. It only 
brings into one light the scattered rays. It 
stands apart from the objects of human 
thought and sensation only because it stands 
above them and gathers them up into its 
own unity. It links the universe and all its 
laws with God, truth with life, beauty with 
goodness, love with law. But this is a 
theme too vast and deep for such a paper as 
this. I cannot do better than close with the 
words of Dr. Trench: "It is God alone in 
Whom any intelligent creature can find its 
centre and true repose ; only when man has 
found Him does the great Eureka (I have 
found) burst forth from his lips: in Augus- 
tine's beautiful and often quoted words: 
^Lord, Thou hast made us for Thee, and 
our heart is restless until it resteth in 
Thee.' " 



THE TEN VIRGINS 



THE TEN VIRGINS 

S. Matt. XXV. 1-13 

I. THE DIVINE AD\TENT 

The parable of the Ten Virgins is one 
of the most beautiful and yet one of the 
most searching and solemn of all the 
parables. Deep as the meanings may be 
which underlie its details, its main lesson 
stands 0'..t with impressive simplicity, and 
as we read it experience and conscience are 
the best interpreters. The setting of the 
story is the picturesque ceremonial of a 
Hebrew wedding. When night has fallen, 
the bridegroom, attended by his friends, 
proceeds to the home of the bride, claims 
her, leads her forth with her own maidens 
to his house or to the place selected for the 



84 PARABLES OF JESUS 

marriage feast. On the way the procession 
is joined by other maidens, who are waiting 
for it, and these all, with lamps or torches 
in their hands, often with music and sing- 
ing, pass into the place of banquet. Our 
Lord speaks, as it were, from the heart of 
His own people, but the lessons He teaches 
are for all times. Let us try to learn some 
of them as we follow the story step by step. 
The Ten Virgins go forth to meet the 
bridegroom and await his coming, as he 
leads his bride, the prize of his love, with 
him. We take the Virgins to represent 
simply our human nature awaiting its true 
consummation. The universe itself is a 
traveller, journeying towards the fulfilment 
of a destiny, yet to be revealed. ^Tor we 
know that the whole creation groaneth and 
travaileth in pain together until now." 
Science calls this strange and toilsome 
journey "evolution," and can tell us the 
story of its stages; religion calls it the 
slowly unfolding Purpose of God. Within 
this universal movement and expectancy 
man has his own place — he marches at 



THE TEN VIRGINS 85 

its head. He is conscious in himself, in 
body, in mind, and spirit, of his incomplete- 
ness, and in that very knowledge he finds 
the token and pledge of a completeness still 
awaiting him. However darkened by sin, 
deluded by mistakes, thwarted by manifold 
imperfections, he cannot silence that im- 
perious "Forward" which he takes to be 
the voice of his destiny. 

"Ay, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp. 
Or what's a heaven for?" 

Can we at all foreshadow that "Divine 
event," that completion of man and of 
the world, that "heaven" in store? To 
this question science of itself can give no 
answer: It can speak only of the present 
and the past. Philosophy essays to answer, 
and its answer has rich meaning for those 
who are capable of understanding its modes 
of thought and speech. But religion gives 
an answer definite and intelligible to all. It 
is that the great consummation is the pass- 
ing, the return, of all things into God, or the 
union of man, and through man of the 



86 PARABLES OF JESUS 

world, with God. And the Christian Faith, 
for vindication of its hope, points back to 
a Divine Revelation in which the final truth 
was shown forth. In Christ, the perfect 
union between the world and man, God was 
revealed. His spirit is in man and in the 
world, realizing age by age the union thus 
revealed. In a word, the great unfolding 
Purpose of God is, in ^^the fulness of the 
times, to sum up all things in Christ." The 
fulfilment of all that the Incarnation meant 
is the great consummation. This is, in the 
language of the New Testament, the com- 
ing of the Bridegroom for which the world 
is waiting. 

Again, as in the movement of all things 
towards the great completion humanity is 
in the van of the world, so necessarily the 
Church must be in the van of humanity. 
For the Church is the ^^body" in which the 
Spirit of the Christ dwells, through which 
as His "organ" (you will remember our 
thoughts about this in a previous paper) 
He carries out His great work of gathering 
all this movement into Himself. The 



THE TEN VIRGINS 87 

Church is meant to be— alas ! that it should 
so constantly fail in realizing its true mean- 
ing! — that section of humanity which is 
ever bringing all that is true in life and 
thought and feeling, "the glory and the 
honour of the nations," into union with God 
in Christ. Thus, in the parable the Bride 
is specially the Church, and the Ten 
Virgins, the friends of the Bride, are 
specially the men and women who, as the 
members of the Church, inspired by its 
Faith and sustained by its life, are ever 
working and waiting for the fulfilment of 
its purpose. The whole meaning of their 
life is that they have ''gone forth to meet the 
Bridegroom." 

Do you complain that these thoughts are 
too high? that we cannot attain unto them? 
that they seem indeed not thoughts at all 
but mere vague high-sounding words? Cer- 
tainly they represent ways of thinking and 
speaking very unfamiliar to most of us. But, 
after all, they are the thoughts and words of 
the New Testament, especially of S. Paul. 
They were very rich and inspiring once, in 



88 PARABLES OF JESUS 

the great days, for example, of the Church 
of Alexandria. Our modern Christianity 
loses enormously in depth and power be- 
cause our religious perspective is so narrow 
and meagre. Yet it ought not to be difficult 
to translate such high themes into the terms 
of our experience. Do we not all know 
what it is, in quietly watching some sunset, 
to feel a strange yearning, almost a pain of 
yearning, for some Beauty which lies be- 
yond? Well, there we had a momentary in- 
sight into the incompleteness of a world 
which has not yet realized its destiny. We 
felt 

"Those obstinate questionings 

Of sense and outward things, 

Falling from us, vanishings; 

Blank misgivings of a creature 
Moving about in worlds not realized, 
High instincts before which our mortal Nature 
Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised." 

But more simply still — do we not all feel 
that there is a void in our life, which not 
all our interests and cares, all our loves 
and friendships can wholly fill? That the 



THE TEX VIRGIXS 89 

energies of our being are still desultory and 
uncertain, wanting clearness and decisive- 
ness of purpose, that its deepest needs are 
still unsatisfied? And, if we are Christians 
at all, do we not know that somehow all 
this sense of incompleteness, this vague de- 
sire, shapes itself more and more distinctly, 
into the one single aspiration, "Christ'7 
Then, if this be so, we realize what our life 
is waiting for: we are likened unto the Ten 
Virgins who went forth to meet the Bride- 
groom. 

II. THE LAMP AX OUTWARD SIGN 

They ^*took their lamps." The lamps 
were plainly the outward signs that they 
were a company awaiting a bridegroom. 
This gives us a clue to their meaning in 
the parable. If we are companions of the 
Bride, Christians, members of the Church, 
our "lamps" are the outward signs of our 
Christian profession — the religious habits 
which we obser^'e, such as prayers, use of 
the Sacraments, attendance at Divine 



90 PARABLES OF JESUS 

worship, or the good works which because 
we are Christians we try to do. These are 
all signs of that attitude of expectancy, that 
sense of incompleteness apart from Christ, 
which is involved in the Christian life. 

They who say and do such things ^^declare 
plainly that they seek a country" — that 
there is a completion of their life for which 
they crave. That at least is implied, 
whether sincerely or insincerely, in the out- 
ward signs of Christian profession — in tak- 
ing our lamps. 



III. THE INWARD SPIRIT 

The lamp itself cannot shine: the light 
comes from the oil with which the lamp is 
filled. "The wise virgins" took the oil with 
them : the foolish forgot it. In spite of all 
discussions on the point, there is no real 
difficulty in interpreting the meaning of the 
oil. It is that inward spiritual life which 
alone can give reality and efficacy to the 
outward life of religion. Both in the Old 



THE TEN VIRGINS 91 

and the New Testament the symbol of oil 
is associated with the Holy Spirit. S. John 
speaks of the Christian having ''an anoint- 
ing from the Holy One." In the ancient 
hymn of the Church we pray to the Holy 
Spirit, ''Anoint and cheer our soiled face 
with the abundance of Thy Grace." To 
have oil in our lamps is to have within and 
behind all our external acts and habits of 
religion an interior life of communion with 
God, in which distractions are removed, the 
channels between the soul and God are 
open, so that the Holy Spirit moves through 
them, fulfilling His work of perfecting the 
fellowship between man and God. It is to 
"walk in the Spirit," "to be in the Spirit." 
Without this oil of the Spirit our lamps 
have no light. We may be regular and 
conscientious in our stated prayers, diligent 
in our attendance at church, in our use of 
the means of grace. We may be students 
of the Scriptures, or constant readers of 
theological books, or experts in theological 
discussions. We may be intensely inter- 
ested in Church affairs. We may be "excel- 



92 PARABLES OF JESUS 

lent organizers," and full of energy in all 
sorts of good works. We may be very 
Marthas in our religious activities. But the 
one thing needful is lacking — the reality of 
personal spiritual life, in which, withdrawn 
from everything external, we are ^^ac- 
quainted with God," and are conscious of a 
personal relationship, as real and intimate 
as that which binds us to a friend. There 
must be the lamp — the outward visible 
^'body" of our religion, the sphere of its 
witness to the world : but the lamp is useless 
without the oil — the inner spirit with its 
own personal hold upon God. 



IV. THE TIMES OF SLEEP 

^While the Bridegroom tarried they all 
slumbered and slept. Our Lord speaks 
here of the inevitable times of reaction, 
when the first thrill of going forth is past, 
and for a long spell there are no unmistak- 
able signs of the presence of the Bride- 
groom. Such times there have been often 



THE TEN VIRGINS 93 

in the history of the Church, periods of 
pause, when no one seems to have an ''open 
vision," no prophet speaks as one coming 
straight from the Lord before Whom he 
stands, no great movement attests the energy 
of the Holy Spirit. Perhaps we in this gen- 
eration have been passing through such a 
time of slumber. It is not a time, with all its 
merits, conspicuous for high hopes, great 
words, striking personalities, or constrain- 
ing causes. We feel as if the stream of 
Christian life has somehow got locked in a 
backwater, and is in danger of becoming 
stagnant. 

Such periods, again, there must be in 
the history of every soul. Probably only 
very superficial people or those who are, in 
the beautiful Scottish phrase, ''far ben," es- 
cape this discipline of dullness. But even 
then the "wise" man will keep his oil by 
him: his soul will still be "waiting upon the 
Lord his God." However fruitless it may 
seem, he w^ill never give up his times of 
quiet prayer and thought. Surely God 
marks the pathos of a dumb spirit's plead- 



94 PARABLES OF JESUS 

ing. Perhaps when it is least expected a 
token of His presence and power will come. 

V. THE AWAKENING 

At midnight there is a cry, "Behold the 
Bridegroom! Come ye forth to meet Him." 
Doubtless there is the thought here of the 
final coming of the Lord Christ in His 
glory. But it is not surely the exclusive 
thought. As Dr. Trench says, "While there 
is one crowning advent of the Lord at the 
last He comes no less in all the signal 
crises of the Church, at each new manifesta- 
tion of His Spirit." We spoke just now of 
the religious slumber of our own genera- 
tion. But are there not signs appearing of a 
spiritual revival, voices whispering, per- 
haps, rather than proclaiming, but still 
audible, "Behold the Bridegroom!" There 
is a growing weariness of religious con- 
troversy, a sense of the hoUowness of all our 
pushing and striving religious organiza- 
tions, and of the urgent need of a recovery 
of the strength and fire of the Spirit. It may 



THE TEN VIRGINS 95 

be that this conviction of our need is an ad- 
vance-messenger of the Lord Himself, sum- 
moning us to come forth to meet Him in 
some new outpouring of His Grace. To 
the individual soul as well as to the Church 
there come these heralds announcing the 
approach of the Bridegroom. Whatever 
arouses within us some new sense of our 
need of Christ, it may be the weariness of 
ineffectual living, or the conviction of some 
sin brought home to the conscience, or an 
impatience with our petty inconsistencies 
and miserable surrenders to evil, or a clear 
vision of what our life might have of joy 
and liberty if we only made up our minds 
to have done with vacillation and whole- 
heartedly to accept the mastery of Christ: 
all these are summonses to go forth and 
meet the Bridegroom. They may be heard 
also in calls to new^ and more strenuous acts 
of service in the cause of God's Kingdom or 
of His poor. I do not believe that any man 
with any sort of religious honesty can say 
that such messengers have never reached 
him. 



96 PARABLES OF JESUS 



VI. THE EXHAUSTED OIL 

But these calls when they come are 
searching tests. "The foolish said unto the 
wise, ^Give us of your oil, for our lamps are 
going out.' " Surely these most pathetic) 
words find an echo in many hearts at the 
present time. The foolish virgins were 
there in real desire to meet the bridegroom, 
only at the critical moment when they were 
asked to go forth the oil which they had 
allowed to exhaust itself failed them, and 
they found that their lamps were going out. 
Our aspirations in this generation are set 
Christ-wards, but there is little correspond- 
ence between them and our honest spiritual 
grasp or self-discipline. In the day of dull- 
ness we have allowed the inner spiritual life 
to get stale. It has become exhausted, and 
we have taken no pains to replenish it; and, 
as Richard Holt Hutton said, "if men come 
to Christ with exhausted natures they will 
never know what there is in Him. A 
generation of which the most impressive]' 



THE TEN VIRGINS 97 

characteristic is its spiritual fatigue will 
never be truly Christian till it can husband 
its energy better, and consent to forego 
many petty interests that it may not forego 
the religion of the Cross." Or, again, there 
are many men warmly, perhaps enthu- 
siastically. Christian in sentiment, who are 
vaguely unsettled in their faith, who are 
ever asking questions and never taking time 
to answer them, in whose minds the old 
phrases of the Creed at once arouse a mist 
of qualifications, evasions, explanations. 
But a faith so diluted has no spiritual 
strength: it creates no power of spiritual 
venture: it is incapable of meeting great 
calls. When the Bridegroom's coming is 
announced it can only cry to stronger, sim- 
pler natures : "Give us of your oil, for our 
lamps are going out." 



VII. VAIN IS THE HELP OF MAN 

"But the wise answered saying, Ter- 
adventure there will not be enough for us 



98 PARABLES OF JESUS 

and you : go ye rather to them that sell and 
buy for yourselves/ ^' A profound and 
solemn truth lies hid in these simple words. 
The great crises and opportunities of life 
can never be met and used by borrowed 
spiritual power. Assent to other men's 
thoughts can never be a substitute for con- 
victions reached by our own, and in times 
of testing, convictions alone can stand the 
strain. In the last resort no man can de- 
liver his brother's soul, so that he must let 
that alone for ever. We must buy for our- 
selves, buy the oil of clear faith and spirit- 
ual strength from the Spirit of God, and 
the price we must pay is our own personal 
thought and toil and prayer. While there 
is yet time, before the last great chance has 
come and gone, let a man be wise and go 
and buy. Let him, on his knees alone with 
God, face his sins and ask pardon for them, 
and set his will against them: let him re- 
solve to have done with vacillation and 
postponement, and choose his side in the 
great contest between faith and uncertainty, 
God and the world, Let him in the stress 



THE TEN VIRGINS 99 

of his own need lay hold of the power of 
God in Christ, even though he wrestle till 
the breaking of the day. Then and then 
only will he be able to be ready for God's 
call, to fulfil his destiny, and ^'go in with 
the Bridegroom to the marriage-feast." 



VIII. THE CLOSE OF OPPORTUNITY 

"And the door was shut. Afterwards 
came also the other virgins, saying, 'Lord, 
Lord, open to us/ But he answered and 
said, ^Verily, I say unto you, I know you 
not' " The door was shut. There is, if 
God's great gift of free will be not a delu- 
sion there must be, ultimately, the close of 
opportunity. Some chance, though we can- 
not discern it, will be the last. You will 
notice that the poor foolish virgins still 
keep their first desire: the cry of their 
wishes is still "Lord, Lord, open to us." But 
there comes a limit to mere wishing — a 
time when it is proved finally futile. And 
to those who have to the end contented 



loo PARABLES OF JESUS 

themselves with sentiments and aspirations 
and have postponed decisions and avoided 
convictions, the awful word is spoken by 
the just and loving judge — ^'I know you 
not." When the close of opportunity has 
come He knows only those who have set 
their minds and souls and wills in prayer 
and sacrifice to the life-work of knowing 
Him. Surely there is nothing in all Scrip- 
ture more solemn, more searching, than this 
judgment of mere good wishes. ''Watch, 
therefore, for ye know not the day nor the 
hour!' 



THE TALENTS 



THE TALENTS 

S. Matt. XXV. 14-30 
I. THE STRICT ACCOUNT 

The parables of the Ten Virgins and of 
the Talents are so closely connected both in 
the order of S. Matthew's narrative and in 
their own inner meaning that we must pass 
at once from the former to the latter. In the 
last chapter the parable of the Ten Virgins 
taught us the necessity of keeping the 
inward spiritual life true and fresh. It was 
a call to spiritual renewal. Now, we are to 
learn from the parable of the Talents that 
a real spiritual life must manifest itself in 
vigorous and efficient service. The true 
object of ''salvation," of inner Tightness 



I04 PARABLES OF JESUS 

with God, is not to save one's own soul, but 
to do God service; it is not that we may 
be secure, but that God may be glorified. 
We are saved in order that we may serve: 
and if we refuse the service we may lose 
the salvation. Many a spiritual "revival" 
has led to disappointment and even shame 
because this elementary truth has been 
forgotten. 

In this parable, as it has been truly said,* 
"Christ represents Himself to us under the 
figure of what we should call an exacting 
man of business of the best type.'' Such a 
figure may at first sight surprise us. But 
our ordinary human experience teaches us 
that it must be true. Strictness is the truest 
kindness. An indulgent master demeans 
and spoils his servants. A strict master 
honours and raises them by entrusting even 
the meanest with a definite responsibility, 
and expecting him to fulfil it. So God's 
justice is part of His love. Because He 
loves He trusts: He invests His servants 

* Bishop Gore's "Charge to the Diocese of 
Worcester," p. i. 



THE TALENTS 105 

with the honour of responsibility; and be- 
cause He trusts, His claims are high and 
His demands exacting. His love gives re- 
sponsibility; His justice demands efficiency 
of service. We dishonour God if we think 
of His love as a mere tolerant good nature; 
God would dishonour us if He accepted 
indifferent and casual service. 

The central figure in the parable is the 
timorous and diffident servant. Our Lord 
often surprises us by selecting for special 
warning those w^hom the world would be 
ready to excuse or even to admire. Here 
we would expect Him to select one of those 
to whom great opportunities were given as 
His example of the abuse of trust. As for 
this obscure servant, with his one poor 
talent — he is respectable, he is honest, he is 
neither wasteful nor fraudulent; he is only 
distrustful of himself, diffident, and un- 
ambitious. Surely he might be excused. 
But no: it is just he who is sent into "the 
outer darkness." His very diffidence is 
turned against him — if he was not large- 
minded enough to understand his Master's 



io6 PARABLES OF JESUS 

purpose, or brave-spirited enough to make 
ventures in His cause, at least his very fear 
might have impelled him to be active. 
"Thou wicked and slothful servant, thou 
knewest that I reap where I sowed not, and 
gather where I did not scatter: thou ought- 
est therefore to have put my money to the 
bankers, and at my coming I should have 
received back mine own with interest." It 
is true that God's claim is always in propor- 
tion to the opportunity He gives: that to 
whom little is given of him little shall be 
required. But the lesson of the parable is 
that that little shall be required exactly and 
with interest. Are there not thousands of 
quiet, respectable men and women, who 
shelter themselves behind the obscurity of 
their lives and the smallness of their endow- 
ments, and never venture forth under the 
pressure of a great ideal, and contentedly 
believe that God cannot expect open and 
strenuous service from them? It would 
never occur to them that they of all people 
were in special danger of the doom of the 
outer darkness. 



THE TALENTS 107 



II. THE USE OF NATURAL GIFTS 

Consider our use of natural gifts or en- 
dowments. It is by a true instinct of inter- 
pretation that our common English speech 
has borrowed from this parable the word 
^'talents." The phrase is itself a good ser- 
mon. It teaches us that these natural en- 
dowments are given to us by our Maker and 
Master on trust that we shall improve 
them; educate them, put them out to trade; 
and this, not for our own sake only, but for 
His glory. It is this thought which gives 
to all true education a religious value and 
sanction. To educate ourselves is part of 
the duty which we owe to God, and any 
education in which men wilfully stop short 
of the best, the fullest possible, is not 
religious education. Religious education is 
not merely instruction in religion ; it is the 
utmost development of our faculties of 
which we are capable for the glory of God. 
Life is, therefore, one long continuation 
school, and every true servant of God must 



io8 PARABLES OF JESUS 

be one of its scholars. I may most confidently 
say that no one who reads these pages is 
without some natural gift or capacity, how- 
ever humble, some special taste or aptitude 
of mind or body. If it be only one, it is a 
talent with which we are to trade that it 
may be increased. Christian people have 
special need of the reminder that the devel- 
opment of natural talent is an integral part 
of Christian service. The Christian mind 
has dwelt — I do not say too earnestly, for 
that would be impossible, but — too exclu- 
sively on salvation from the sin by which 
human nature has been ruined, too little on 
consecration of the gifts with which human 
nature has been endowed. But even on the 
cross of Christ human life was not so much 
crucified as made capable of consecration. 
Christ came that we might have life, and 
have it more abundantly. It is worth while 
to think that among the questions of the 
great day of account not the least disquiet- 
ing to religious people may be those which 
ask what they have done with the natural 
talents committed to their charge. 



THE TALENTS 109 



III. THE USE OF SPIRITUAL 
ENDOWMENTS 

Consider, also, our use of spiritual en- 
dowments. Here, again, we cannot hon- 
estly plead that we have none. The very 
instinct of religion is itself one — one which 
raises the humblest man to a point in 
the scale of creation immeasurably higher 
than the noblest animal. It is this instinct 
of religion which we are asked to 
strengthen and deepen by care and thought 
and effort. Is it not true that the average 
Englishman is sensible of the need of hard 
work in every other sphere of life except 
religion? Elsewhere he is strenuous and 
active: there he is curiously indolent. He 
seems to think that religion requires nothing 
more for its sustenance than occasional feel- 
ings or a few acts of dutiful observance. It 
is true, of course, that its source is the Spirit 
of God, but in this, as in all His gifts, the 
Spirit of God requires the co-operation of 
the spirit of man. It is true that we are 



no PARABLES OF JESUS 

inheritors of the Kingdom of God, but it is 
only by the output of thought and will that 
we can realize our heritage. Let us apply 
this truth to two necessary parts of religion 
— study and prayer. 

Study. How many of us can say at 
this moment that we are engaged in some 
definite study of a book of the Bible or of 
Christian doctrine? Are we not apt to take 
some limited point of Christian truth — the 
tradition in which we were brought up, the 
presentment of Christian doctrine to which 
we are accustomed, it may be the truth 
which first appealed to us — and ^'bury it in 
the earth," keeping jealous guard over it, 
almost suspecting any addition to it! But 
there is no Christian truth, however simple, 
which would not, if only we thought it out 
and ^^traded" with it, lead us by its own 
kinship with them to other truths, wider, 
deeper, and higher. We must ''follow on," 
by thought and study, ''to know the Lord." 
Otherwise we stand in danger of losing even 
the talent which we had — and what was 
once a truth becomes, often without oui; 



THE TALENTS in 

knowing it, a form. 'Tor unto every one 
that hath shall be given; but from him that 
hath not even that which he hath shall be 
taken away." 

Prayer. No one, surely, can deny that 
he has the instinct of prayer. Even among 
the least religious it proves itself to be, in 
times of anxiety or sorrow, almost invin- 
cible. In its simplest form it is a gift most 
wonderful — a token of the kinship which, 
deep-set in the very elements of being, binds 
the children to the Father. Yet how little 
trouble we take to improve our power of 
prayer, how feeble are the ventures of faith 
or perseverence which we throw into it! 
We know the excuses which are ready upon 
our lips: "I find my prayers so difficult, so 
unreal. I have no power of imagination, or 
thought, or expression. If God expects 
from me eager and fervent prayers. He is 
expecting to reap what He has not sowed, 
and to gather what He has not scattered." 
It is the very plea of the slothful servant; 
and, like him, we are content merely to 
keep the talent, to be satisfied with some 



112 PARABLES OF JESUS 

routine of prayer as a duty for the day. 
But are we to expect that we can compass 
a thing so wonderful as converse with God 
without patient and persevering effort? Let 
us lay the truth to heart, that what God 
values, in prayer, what He most certainly 
rewards, is not the immediate fervour of 
feeling, but the loyal setting of the will 
towards Himself. We are often nearest 
God when we feel Him least. For prayer 
which perseveres in spite of dryness of 
feeling is for that very reason a real venture 
of faith. As such it earns its interest, the 
interest of added strength of will, clearness 
of purpose, peace of conscience. The mere 
act of prayer, if only a sincere will is behind 
it, is as it were a hand stretched out in the 
darkness to God. His hand will meet it 
even if we do not feel the grasp. To one 
who was in trouble because of the want of 
any felt satisfaction in prayer, a wise man 
said: "If you have not gained a sense of 
the presence of God, you have gained the 
next best thing, a sense of His absence." 
To realize the desire for God, is to have 



THE TALENTS 113 

that hunger of the soul which He is pledged 
to satisfy, and this of itself lifts a man far 
above the mass who neither know the joy 
of God's presence, nor feel the pain of His 
absence. 



IV. THE USE OF OPPORTUNITIES OF 
SERVICE 

Consider finally, and chiefly, the use of 
our opportunities for active service in the 
Kingdom of God. There is no question that 
by our baptism our life stands under the 
pledge of service. It is not the privilege of 
the few, but the duty of all. The living 
Christ is ever in the van of all efforts to 
rescue and redeem the world, and every 
Christian must be there at His side. He 
cannot be '4n Christ" sharing his victory 
without being ^'with Christ" sharing the toil 
of His service. No man can be in the true 
sense a Christian who does not know and 
keep some definite place in the labours of 
Christ's Kingdom. For some talent, some 



114 PARABLES OF JESUS 

opportunity of influence, some chance of 
work we all possess. God never set any man 
in any part of His universe without setting 
some opportunity of service at his side. 
Whatever it may be, we are to begin there 
and work in a great spirit. 

What is wanting is not the work, but the 
vigilance to see it, the readiness to welcome 
it, the eagerness to do it. Men are so apt 
to plead — -^'I am so unimportant; my gifts 
are so few; I am beset by temptations; I 
find it hard enough to keep my own life 
straight." But such excuses only echo the 
plea of the slothful servant; and they lead 
to the outer darkness. Or, when we have 
undertaken some work, we are so easily 
depressed and discomfited. ^The diffi- 
culties are too great; the failures are mani- 
fest; there seems to be no result; it is 
not worth while to go on struggling with 
the impossible for ever!'^ Thus, we lose 
hope and energy and vigilance for new 
chances, and readiness for new ventures, 
and sink back into some mere routine of 
duty, where at least we are within the 



THE TALENTS 115 

region of the possible. But in God's sight 
the worth of our life is never the success 
which it secures, but always the spirit 
which it puts forth. We are better men if 
we fail in a high endeavour than if we suc- 
ceed in a meagre one. The great thing is 
to be up and doing, to be strengthening the 
world's hard upward course, and resisting 
its easy downward course, by the resolute 
output of faith and effort. 

There are many signs that we have come 
to a time in the history of God's Kingdom 
when it is just the acts of quiet, individual, 
personal service which are specially 
needed. We have too long entrusted the 
work of the Kingdom to particular classes, 
such as the clergy, to schemes and societies, 
and all sorts of public organizations. The 
comparative failure of these public and 
official efforts must compel us to summon a 
power higher and stronger than any which 
they possess — the power of personal influ- 
ence. Never was charity so widespread and 
enthusiastic, but alas! at least in our great 
cities, it has done almost as much to degrade 



ii6 PARABLES OF JESUS 

as it has done to raise the poor. And why? 
Because it has neglected the one really 
strong power of uplifting— personal care 
and thought and persistence. We are 
anxious, in the midst of endless contro- 
versies, as to the future of religious educa- 
tion in our schools. Is not this very anxiety 
meant to send us back to God's own ap- 
pointed school, the home, and to His own 
appointed teachers, the parents, that we 
may make both efficient? 

Here then it is — in this region of small 
things and personal efforts, of single talents, 
that we are to make our ventures of faith. 
There is no truth more wonderfully borne 
out by experience than that the one talent 
when put out to trade in a spirit of faith 
and prayer grows in value. Almost all the 
great movements which have revived re- 
ligion and relieved the poverty and suffer- 
ing of this world have arisen, as the parable 
of the mustard-seed taught us, from small 
beginnings used in a courageous and faith- 
ful spirit. To come to a humbler level, 
could any opportunity of service seem less 



THE TALENTS 117 

than that of a poor mechanic, condemned 
for long years to his bed by a distressing and 
incurable illness? Yet I have known such 
a man make his sick-room the centre of a 
remarkable and widespread spiritual influ- 
ence among all classes of men, and collect 
in a single year, while he himself for his 
own wants depended partly on poor relief, 
more than one hundred pounds for the 
work of Christ's Church. These surely are 
the servants whom the King delights to 
honour. There are two surprises — one may 
venture to think — which await us in the day 
when the Lord returns to make His reckon- 
ing with His servants. One, the place of 
honour given to plain, simple men and 
women, who put a great spirit of service 
into humble opportunities; the other, the 
open and tragic shame of multitudes of 
feeble, self-centred, respectable people, 
who buried their talents in dull and com- 
placent routine. In the spiritual world, the 
path of ease and safety is the path of peril | 
for, in the noble words of Samuel Ruther- 
ford, "the safest way, I am persuaded, is to 



ii8 PARABLES OF JESUS 

tyne* and win with Christ, and to hazard 
fairly for Him; for heaven is but a com- 
pany of noble venturers for Christ." 



V. THE LABOUR NOT IN VAIN 

If — but only if — ^we are thus trading 
zealously and eagerly with our talents, 
"hazarding fairly for Christ," then even we 
can venture sometimes to look forward to 
the great words of the Lord of Life, words 
in which life on this scene finds its crown 
and consummation, words whose very 
sound is music in the march of duty — "Well 
done, good and faithful servant: enter thou 
into the joy of thy Lord." Even here, as 
bodily exercise sends a glow of health and 
delight into all the limbs, so resolute and 
brave-hearted service brings into the very 
midst of toil and stress a deep sense of joy 
— the joy of one who knows that what he 
does is infinitely worth doing. 

*That is, lose. 



THE TALENTS 119 

If there is any worker in the world 
who can sing a song of courage it is the 
fellow- worker with Christ; for he, above 
all men, knows that ''his labour is not in 
vain in the Lord." Yet, after all, these mo- 
ments of joy are but foretastes of that which 
is to come — rather, airs cheering and in- 
spiriting, reaching us in the plain from the 
high lands where the joy of God is the abid- 
ing atmosphere. When the time comes, it 
is into that joy of his Lord that the faithful 
servant is ushered, the joy of "heaven," of 
the life where God's will is eternally done, 
His purpose eternally fulfilled, His rest 
eternally assured. As Leighton beautifully 
said:* "It is but little we can receive here, 
some drops of joy that enter into us; but 
there we shall enter into joy, as vessels put 
into a sea of happiness." It is a thought 
which we can only dare to frame for our- 
selves in the pauses of resolute and unceas- 
ing service; but when it rises before us, the 
thrill of expectancy which it arouses sends 

* Quoted by Trench, p. 278. 



120 PARABLES OF JESUS 

into all the labour a spirit at once of ardour 
and of peace. The other day I received a 
letter from a stalwart labourer in dockyard 
and church, whose terse words I would pass 
on to my readers as a summary of all that 
makes work worth doing and toil worth 
bearing — ^'Cheer up, dear sir, there is rest 
ahead: we shall soon hear the ^Come up' 
and the Well done.' " 



THE GOOD SAMARITAN 



THE GOOD SAMARITAN 

S. Luke X. 30-37 

I. WHO IS MY NEIGHBOUR? 

The story of the good Samaritan is one 
of our Lord's greatest and most typical 
parables. It is so simple that a child can 
read its meaning; yet it is in truth a treatise 
on practical ethics more profound in 
thought and more powerful in effect than 
any other in the world. Is it too much to 
say that in these few verses there is con- 
tained the essential truth of man's relations 
with his fellow men? Our very familiarity 
with the parable blinds us to the greatness 
of its mingled simplicity and depth and — 
let us add — to the greatness of the claim 



124 PARABLES OF JESUS 

which it makes upon us. We can only 
gather one or two lessons from its store. 

Consider the deep principle of human 
conduct — ^we might almost call it the 
philosophy of life — which the parable con- 
tains. We discover the clue to it when we 
notice that the parable does not answer 
the lawyer's question. The question was: 
^Who is my neighbour?" The parable 
tells what it is to be neighbourly. It seems 
to be a case of logical non sequitur. In fact, 
it is a case of the truth which is deeper than 
logic. Our Lord could not teach the truth 
by answering the question. For the question 
itself was wrong; it revealed a wrong tem- 
perament of mind. It was facing not truth 
but the fundamental error; to follow it 
therefore would have been to lose the truth. 
The lawyer, steeped in all the traditions and 
instincts of his class, wanted our Lord to 
give him a clear and precise definition of 
his neighbour; to mark him out, and set him 
apart from the general mass of mankind. 
But definition means limitation. If our 
Lord had said, ^^This man is your neigh- 



THE GOOD SAMARITAN 125 

bour,'' the inference in the lawyer's mind 
would have been, 'Then that other is not 
my neighbour; I need not concern myself 
with him; I can pass him by." But this 
conclusion would have been the very error 
which Jesus came to banish. He could only 
put the man right by declining to answer 
the question; by taking him to a wholly 
different standpoint, and making him start 
there, namely — ''Be in your own spirit 
neighbourly, and then every man will be 
your neighbour." 

It is worth w^hile to pause here to notice 
the light which our Lord's method of deal- 
ing with the question of the lawyer throws 
on what may often be our Lord's method of 
dealing with the questions which we ask 
now. In our religious and moral difficulties 
we throw out some question as a sort of 
challenge, persuading ourselves that it is 
really decisive. Often it remains unan- 
swered. We are disappointed, discomfited. 
Under such failure of their self-chosen test 
questions, men often give up their faith or 
surrender their moral struggle. But, apart 



126 PARABLES OF JESUS 

from the petulance, the impetuosity, or the 
effort to "justify oneself" which a little 
honest self-scrutiny would often discover 
in our questions, and which are sufficient to 
deprive them of any right to an answer — 
God's wisdom may see that they spring 
from a wrong attitude of mind, that they 
are not facing the line of truth, and there- 
fore refuse to answer them. But all the 
while in some other way, at the moment 
perhaps not discerned. He may be leading 
us to the truth. While our mind remains 
a blank as to that particular difficulty which 
we thought of such crucial importance. He 
may be bringing some other truth before 
us, or shaping our lives by some special ex- 
perience, so that after a time we shall find, 
perhaps without knowing how, that that old 
question has been answered in some other 
way, or has been proved futile or superflu- 
ous. Often when we have been discussing 
their difficulties v/ith some impetuous boy 
or some eager but ignorant workingman, 
we have realized how hopeless it would be 
to answer their clamant questions without 



THE GOOD SAMARITAN 127 

correcting their assumptions or returning to 
first principles. It would be well for our- 
selves to see here an analogy with the light 
in which our own impatient questions must 
be viewed by the patient wisdom of God 
and a reason why they so often seem to go 
unanswered. 



II. THE SPIRIT OF NEIGHBOURLINESS 

In order to know who is our neighbour 
we must first possess the true spirit of 
neighbourliness. It is the spirit of love 
which knows no limitations. The natural 
man always tends to look at his rela- 
tionship with his fellows in the light of the 
lawyer's question: to regard as his '^neigh- 
bours" — as men who have a claim upon his 
thought and help — persons clearly defined 
and set apart by distinctions of race, class, 
occupations, locality, and the like. The 
Jew, in spite of the generosity towards the 
stranger of his own Law, would regard 
his fellow-Jew as a neighbour; but he had 



128 PARABLES OF JESUS 

"no dealings with the Samaritan." The 
whole system of caste is an elaborate defini- 
tion and restriction of the neighbour. The 
spirit of the East is wonderfully described 
in Arnold's poem, ^The Sick King at 
Bockhara," in which the Vizier taunts the 
king with his foolish compassion — 

"The Kaffirs also, whom God curse, 

Vex one another night and day. 
There are the lepers and all sick; 

There are the poor who faint alway. 
All these have sorrow and keep still 

While other men make cheer and sing. 
Wilt thou have pity on all these? 

No : nor on this dead dog, O King." 

The free citizen of Greece or Rome saw 
no neighbour's claim in the subject or the 
slave. Even now, the white man's civiliza- 
tion when it is left to itself regards the 
coloured man as a chattel for its own 
convenience, not as a neighbour entitled to 
its care and compassion. Dr. Trench quotes 
a striking passage from the Essays of 
Emerson — in many ways a type of '^the 
natural man" at his best — "Do not tell me». 



THE GOOD SAMARITAN 129 

as a good man did to-da}^, of my obligation 
to put all poor men into good situations. 
Atq the}' fjiy poor? I tell thee, thou fool- 
ish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, 
the dime, the cent, given to such men as do 
not belong to me, and to whom I do not 
belong." We are always inclined to treat 
as our neighbours only those who can come 
within the narrow circle of our own duties, 
or tastes, or sentiments. The remedy lies 
not in enlarging these circles or adding to 
our lists so much as in changing our whole 
point of view. We are to have — so to 
say — a soul of neighbourliness for man as 
man. 

It was this revolution in man's way of 
looking at his fellows which Jesus came to 
accomplish. If we may dare to put it thus 
boldly — God made Humanity His neigh- 
bour. Beholding Humanity robbed of its 
true nature, stripped of its ideal, wounded 
by its sins, unable to rise, He came down to 
it, entered it, healed, and restored it. He 
^Svas made man." The Incarnation has 
made human nature itself sacred. The 



I30 PARABLES OF JESUS 

Christian, the follower of Christ, must 
therefore see in every man his neighbour. 
The claim is not his class or condition, but 
his mere humanity. And the Incarnation 
not only revealed this ideal of neighbourli- 
ness, but made it possible for us to realize 
it. Man in himself we might not be able to 
love — but the Christ in man we can. ^^St. 
Francis," we are told, 'Vas riding one day 
near Assisi while he was still perplexed as 
to the nature of his future work, when sud- 
denly he was startled by a loathsome spec- 
tacle. A leper was seated at the roadside. 
For a moment he gave way to natural hor- 
ror, till he remembered that he wished to 
be Christ's soldier. Then he returned and 
dismounted and went up to the poor suf- 
ferer and giving an alms kissed lovingly 
the hand which received it. Strong in his 
hard-won victory he rode on; but when he 
looked back, there was no beggar to be seen; 
and therefore his heart was filled with un- 
utterable joy, for he knew that he had seen 
the Lord." So in his simple way he real- 
ized the truth of neighbourliness which he 



THE GOOD SAMARITAN 131 

afterwards taught his brothers. "When 
thou seest a poor man, my brother, an 
image of Christ is set before thee. And in 
the weak behold the weakness which He 
took upon him." 



III. PRIEST AND SAMARITAN 

Turn next to the parable itself — the 
application of the general truth. It was 
a Samaritan who "proved himself neigh- 
bour"; the priest and the Levite failed 
in the test — they "passed by on the other 
side." Our Lord thus gives a revelation 
of real, and a rebuke of unreal, religion. 
The Priest and the Levite represent formal, 
organized religion; the Samaritan repre- 
sents the essential spirit of religion. Let 
us not make the common and foolish 
mistake of supposing that Jesus meant to 
condemn the religion of the Priest and 
Levite, and to commend the religion of the 
Samaritan. He himself loyally conformed 
to the religion of the Hebrews: He con- 



132 PARABLES OF JESUS 

fessed that the way of salvation was with 
the Jews. He chose the Samaritan in the 
parable simply in order to strengthen His 
rebuke of the Priest and Levite. It was 
left to a Samaritan to show the Priest and 
the Levite how miserably they had failed to 
hold the spirit of true religion with its 
form. Let us try to apply the rebuke to our 
own times. Alas! it is sorely needed. 

The Christian Church exists in the world 
to be the organized embodiment of the^ 
Spirit of Christ. When it has been true to 
itself, it has been faithful to this high office. 
It was the early Church which made the 
world see what the Spirit of Christ was, by 
its instinctive and eager compassion for the 
poor, the slave, the diseased, the afflicted. 
At its best, to use the noble words of Dr. 
Liddon, the Church '^everywhere stands 
before humanity not as a patroness but as 
might be a loving and faithful servant, who 
is too loyal, too enamoured of her master's 
name and birthright to be otherwise than 
affectionate and respectful in the hour of 
his poverty and his shame." However nat- 



THE GOOD SAMARITAN 133 

ural it may be for ^^the world" to keep sor- 
row, suffering, poverty, out of its sight, as 
things which disturb its enjoyment of life 
or provoke its inconvenient conscience, to 
"pass them by on the other side,'- the Chris- 
tian Church must, so far from avoiding, 
seek them out and cheerfully accept them 
as opportunities for service. It must always 
be on the side where need and distress are 
lying. This ought to be the very instinct of 
its life. 

But there are times when the Church 
forgets its primary duty. Wealth, comfort, 
ease, enfeeble the energy of its compassion. 
The smoothness of conventional routine 
deadens its spirit. Or, it becomes over- 
occupied with its interests and claims as an 
institution, with the elaboration of its cere- 
monies, with controversy about its doc- 
trines, and its character as a brotherhood of 
service grows faint and feeble. It becomes 
the Priest and the Levite and passes by on 
the other side. Then it is that the Samari- 
tan is sent to rebuke it and recall it to its 
true life. The Spirit of the Divine Neigh- 



134 PARABLES OF JESUS 

bour, finding Himself straitened and 
thwarted in His own Body, turns to those 
who are without, and finding a welcome 
there, inspires them to do the service which 
the Church leaves undone. 

Are there not signs at the present time of 
such a situation? The Bishop of South- 
wark recently expressed these signs as a 
weakening of ''embodied" and a strength- 
ening of ''diffusive" Christianity. He 
meant that whereas the Church as an 
organized institution seems to make less 
way than at other epochs, there is, outside 
its borders or at least in no formal connec- 
tion with it, a singular activity of the Chris- 
tian spirit of sympathy and brother! iness. 
The fact is partly an encouragement; it 
proves the width and freedom of the Spirit 
of Christ in man, that far beyond the limits 
of His Church, He is ever active in the 
spirit of man, ennobling and inspiring it. 
But the fact is also a rebuke to the Chris- 
tian Church. If it were true to itself, surely 
it would attract and enlist in its service and 
not repel all this diffused Christian spirit. 



THE GOOD SAMARITAN 135 

It is bound, for the sake of man, to guard 
the historic Faith. In an age of material- 
ism, it is justified in making its worship a 
witness to the dignity and mystery of the 
things unseen and eternal. But does it, with 
anything like equal zest, keep its heart of 
service strong and ardent? Does it seem 
natural to us to describe a body, divided 
into rival sects and filling the air with the 
discordant cries of controversy as a brother- 
hood of neighbourly service? I am not 
thinking of the noble efi'orts of individuals 
and groups within the Church, but of the 
Christian body as a whole. Does it present 
itself to men as a Community in which each 
member, because he is a member, is actively 
engaged in the service of the weak, the poor, 
the distressed? On the other hand, we see 
men and women, weary of Church- 
wrangles, standing outside the pale even of 
the Christian Faith, spending and spent in 
the service of their fellows; and we realize 
that still it is often the Priest and the Levite 
who pass by on the other side, and the 
Samaritan who crosses over and tends and 



136 PARABLES OF JESUS 

serves and ^^proves himself neighbour." 
There is surely no ambition which ought to 
be nearer the heart of every Christian than 
that by his influence and example he may 
make the Christian community a worthier 
reflection of the Divine Neighbour, who is 
ever in the midst of men ''as one that serves." 



IV. UNSELFISH SERVICE 

Consider also the character of the service 
which the true neighbour renders. It is un- 
selfish, thorough and personal. It is unself- 
ish. There is a compassion which is selfish; 
and it is very common. Its motive some- 
times is the indulgence of sentiment. The 
sentiment of compassion like other natural 
emotions craves satisfaction. It is really 
selfish when its primary motive is to satisfy 
itself rather than the need of its recipient. 
The charity which relieves itself by giving 
an alms to any beggar who asks without 
thought or care for his real need, which 
does not consider that that alms may be a 



THE GOOD SAMARITAN 137 

means of encouraging thriftlessness and im- 
posture, may be thus a cruel wrong both to 
the beggar himslf and to the really deserv- 
ing poor; the charity which, moved by some 
sentimental appeal, takes no trouble to see 
whether that appeal is true to facts, or likely 
to do more harm than good — this charity is 
fundamentally false; it is a form of self- 
indulgence. Or, again, the motive may be 
one's own spiritual good. To give an alms 
as a means of relieving one's conscience, or 
acquiring credit in the eyes of God, is really 
a selfish act. It is not admirable, it is merely 
pitiable, to see the crowds of beggars at 
some church door in Italy, maintained in 
beggary rather than lifted out of it, encour- 
aged to trade in the apparatus of misery, by 
the alms of the faithful. True charity, true 
neighbourliness, considers first not the in- 
dulgence of sentiment or the satisfaction of 
conscience, but the true need of the poor. 
And it has come to pass, through the abuse 
of charity, that the true need of the poor is 
often best served by withholding, not giving, 
the heedless and casual dole. 



138 PARABLES OF JESUS 



V. THOROUGH SERVICE 

The service of the Good Samaritan 
is thorough. He discerns and meets all 
the requirements of the case. He binds up 
the wounds, he pours in oil and wine, he 
carries to an inn, he provides for the 
future. He aims at the entire restoration 
of the poor stranger. Thus true charity is 
not content till it has thought out the real 
need of each case, and the best means of 
meeting it so as to prevent its recurrence. 
That thinking out is not easy; it demands 
time and trouble. In the complexity of 
social life, each single case of poverty or 
need is a problem demanding the exercise 
of the best judgment. If we undertake to 
meet it we are bound, for its own sake, to 
give it thought and care, and if we cannot 
do this, to entrust it to those who can. The 
parable of the Good Samaritan, so far from 
encouraging, in truth rebukes haphazard, 
heedless, indiscriminating charity. 



THE GOOD SAMARITAN 139 



VI. PERSONAL SERVICE 

The service which the Samaritan rendered 
was personal. He himself bound up the 
wounds, himself set the stranger on his 
own beast, himself brought him to the inn 
and took care of him. Charity is always 
incomplete unless it involves this element of 
personal service. In these days, we have 
become too much accustomed to acting the 
neighbour by deputy. We give money; we 
leave it to others to give personal service. 
Of course, to a large extent this is a 
necessity of modern life; and we can keep 
even this second-hand charity at least in 
touch with true principles if we take pains 
to follow our money with personal interest 
and sympathy. But we must never be satis- 
fied with this. No amount of subscriptions 
can compensate for this want of the touch 
of person with person; of heart reaching 
heart; of will encouraging and strengthen- 
ing will. Each one of us ought to be able to 
think at once of some individual or family 



HO PARABLES OF JESUS 

in the ranks of the poor, the sick, the dis- 
tressed, whom by personal thought and care 
and act we are trying to comfort and cheer 
and raise. We shall never realize our fel- 
lowship with the Divine Neighbour of 
humanity unless our own mind and heart 
and will are going out in personal service 
to some of those who need and claim our 
compassion. 



THE BARREN FIG-TREE 



THE BARREN FIG-TREE 

S. Luke xiii. 6-9 

I. THE DIVINE DISAPPOIXTMEXT 

This is a parable easy to understand — 
taken from Nature, that great open Book 
of Parables which "he who runs may read/' 
In the corner of the vineyard, protected by 
its walls, and nourished by its specially pre- 
pared soil, a fig-tree has been planted. For 
two years the lord of the vineyard has come 
eagerly expecting to see the promised fruit. 
For two years he has suffered disappoint- 
ment. On the third year his patience is at 
an end. The tree is a failure. It is exhaust- 
ing the soil and hindering the other plants 
and his sentence goes forth: ^^Cut it down; 
why cumbereth it the ground?'' 



144 PARABLES OF JESUS 

But identifying himself with the tree 
in the friendly sympathy for his plants 
which is one of the marks of gardeners — 
that most attractive class of men — the vine- 
dresser pleads for it; that for one year more 
he may be allowed to dig around its roots 

I and fill the spaces with manure, and give it 
thus another trial. And the parable ends 
leaving the fig-tree with a great hope over 

I it, '4f it bear fruit, well" ; but also a great 
risk; ''if not, then after that thou shall cut 
it down." 

Primarily, doubtless, the parable applies 
to the Divine disappointment caused by the 
religious barrenness of the Jews, in spite of 
God's choice of them and of all the care 
which He had lavished upon them. To 
them were given the adoption and the 
glory and the covenants, and the giving of 
the law, and the service of God, and the 
promises." Yet there was no fruit with 
which God could be pleased in the dry and 
lifeless religion of scribe and Pharisee. But 
the parable has also its lesson for every age. 
Let us try to learn it. 



THE BARREN FIG-TREE 145 

Our life also has been planted in a vine- 
yard chosen and guarded by God's fatherly 
care, in a soil of special richness. We have 
been born in a Christian country, inheriting 
the traditions of centuries of Christian life, 
protected by centuries of Christian custom. 
By baptism, we were planted in that Body 
in which all the life-giving energies of the 
Divine Spirit are ever ready for our growth 
and nurture. There we were made ^'mem- 
bers of Christ, children of God, and in- 
heritors of the Kingdom of Heaven." 
Every gift that was needed for our God- 
ward growth was bestowed upon us. Yet 
when we look at our lives as they really are, 
can we say that they show signs of growth 
corresponding to all these possibilities with 
which we were endowed? Let memory 
take its stand at any point in our past life, 
and review the years which have since 
passed. Are we nearer to God in thought 
and plan and purpose? Has it become more 
natural to us to spend a large part of our 
time in communion with God? And yet, 
why should it not have been so? Why 



1 



146 PARABLES OF JESUS 

should there not be a constant and increas- 
ing vitality of the spirit corresponding to 
all this rich endowment which is bestowed 
upon us? What examples there are stored 
for us in the memory of the Church! What 
inspiration lies in the words of the Creed 
which we continually repeat! And yet, how 
listless, inert, and dull our Christian life 
at the best seems to be. I often think of 
the words of an earnest agnostic. He said: 
^'If I could believe one-tenth part of what 
you Christians profess, I think there is 
nothing I could not venture and suffer, 
and yet, when I go to your churches, how 
dull and tame and heavy you Christians 
seem!" 

When we think of the great acts of 
worship and communion in which we 
engage, do we not feel that we are often 
like listless actors repeating their lines and 
performing their prescribed motions? That 
is the original force of the word ^'hypocrite." 
Surely there is scarcely any prayer which 
we Christians ought to have more con- 
stantly in our hearts than this; 'Troni ^U 



THE BARREN FIG-TREE 147 

hypocrisy, good Lord deliver us." And if 
we, at our best moments, feel, as we must 
feel, this heart-sickness at ourselves — how 
can we measure the disappointment of the 
God Who made us? Was it for these poor, 
puny, trifling lives, with their little concerns 
of money and pleasure, their ignoble aims 
and petty sins, that God Almighty gave us 
our birth in nature and our new birth in 
Christ? 



11. CONVENTIONAL CHRISTIANITY 

But notice again, the barren fig-tree 
cumbers the ground. This lifeless, unpro- 
gressive, conventional Christianity into 
which we are all so apt to slip, it also cum- 
bers the ground. To give the force of the 
word in the parable, it does mischief to the 
ground; it is a waste of grace, a restraints 
upon the Spirit of God. It checks the en- 
thusiasm of others, it tempts men to doubt ^ 
whether there is any reality in our religion at 



148 PARABLES OF JESUS 

all. Can we exaggerate the effect of the in- 
consistencies of Christians upon the minds of 
honest men, who are standing critical and 
suspicious without? Certainly we can never 
measure the damage which Christianity 
suffers in the eyes of the heathen when 
they take the average Englishman abroad 
as the type of his religion. But let us 
remember that just in proportion as we 
allow our Christian life to become dim, our 
will feeble, and our spirit listless, so we are 
contributing to this mass, this dead-weight, 
of staleness which lies so heavy upon the 
Christian Church, and buries the tokens of 
the living Christ through Whose presence 
it was meant to arise and shine. Truly, 
shall we exaggerate if we say that if God 
were merely just when He came and visited 
our life. He would say, ^^Cut it down; why 
cumbereth it the ground?'' 



THE BARREN FIG-TREE 149 



III. THE PLEADING OF CHRIST 

Why is it that God is so patient? It is 
because the Vine-dresser is pleading for the 
the barren fig-tree. The Son of Man, to 
Whom this poor, unworthy humanity has 
been committed, has identified Himself 
with the plants of the vineyard. He has 
covered them, as it were, with His own per- 
fect obedience and correspondence to the 
Will of God. He has obtained the right to 
plead that they should be spared yet awhile, 
and any honest confession of our bar- 
renness brings us within the protection of 
that prevailing plea. 

But we cannot, we dare not, presume 
upon that protection; we cannot ask the 
Vine-dresser to plead for us that we may 
yet be spared ; unless we remember the very 
conditions of his plea — that he may be 
allowed to take the tree in hand and work 
His will upon it. Then, and only then, if 
it bears fruit, well — but if not, it must be 
cut down. Our penitence must become sur- 



I50 PARABLES OF JESUS 

render to His will that He may discipline 
and re-create us. It is only through grow- 
ing and bearing fruit that we can attain 
the "assurance of salvation." He Whom 
we plead as an Atonement for us must be 
accepted as the Master-spirit within us. 
Only through daily submission to His influ- 
ence can we begin at last to bear fruit and 
stand the scrutiny of God. 



IV. ABIDING IN CHRIST 

Our Lord Himself has put the truth in 
the plainest words : ''He that abideth in Me 
and I in him, the same bringeth forth much 
fruit; for apart from Me ye can do nothing. 
If a man abide not in Me, he is cast forth 
as a branch and is withered, and men gather 
them and cast them into the fire, and they 
are burnt." 

What then, is this "abiding in Christ"? 
It is the daily merging of our life in all its 
purposes, desires, and plans in His. So 



THE BARREN FIG-TREE 151 

described, it seems very far from any at- 
tainment of ours. But let me point to at 
least four simple means by which a man can 
in some degree make sure of "abiding in 
Christ." 

The first is Faith — the deliberate con- 
verging of all the capacities of our life upoi^ 
one supreme fact — Christ the Way, the 
Truth, and the Life. As faith looks at life, 
it sees one great purpose standing over it — ■ 
Christ's Will; one great Presence consecrate 
ing it — Christ's Spirit. 

Secondly, Prayer. Prayer is the inward 
activity of faith. It means the uplifting of 
our souls in desire, affection, and will to 
God as the supreme end of our life. If our 
prayers are to be the means whereby we 
secure our abiding in Christ, their main 
object must be not to get what we want, 
but to give what God wants — a life surren- 
dered to Himself. Such prayer is the best 
test as to whether our life is or is not abid- 
ing in Christ. If you wish for a simple 
principle by which you can know whether 
any pursuit, or ambition, or course of 



152 PARABLES OF JESUS 

conduct, or friendship is really true to the 
spirit of Christ, think only whether you can 
ask Him to accept and bless it in your 
prayers. William Law has put this test in 
his usual trenchant way. ^'Let us suppose," 
he says, "that a rich man was to put up 
such a prayer as this to God: ^O Lord, I 
Thy sinful creature, who am born again to a 
lively hope of glory in Jesus Christ, beg of 
Thee to grant me a thousand times more 
riches than I need; grant that as the little 
span of life wears out, I may still abound 
more and more in wealth, and that I may 
use and perceive all the best and surest 
chances of growing richer than any of my 
neighbours. This I humbly and fervently 
beg in the Name of Jesus Christ, Amen.' " 
An impossible prayer, but, alas! a life too 
possible and too frequent. We may depend 
upon it that "the same things that make 
an unchristian prayer, make an unchristian 
life." On the other hand, any desire or 
action of our life which will really stand the 
test of honest prayer, we may humbly take 
as "abiding in Christ." 



THE BARREN FIG-TREE 153 

Thirdly, Self-discipline. It is plain that 
if we are to keep our life in union with 
Christ, self-discipline is all essential. The 
road in which Christ's companionship is 
assured is the road of the daily cross. The 
Cross must come to us, not only in power 
to forgive our sins, but in power to inspire 
and to rule our lives. And remember that 
every act of self-discipline, of which no one 
in this world may know, is known and seen 
and registered by Christ Himself, and is a 
link in the chain that binds us to His own 
life-giving and sustaining presence. 

Faith, Prayer, Self-discipline — and lastly 
Sacrament. If in the first three our will 
rises to God, then in the fourth God 
Himself comes down to us, and His Spirit 
passes within us. I think, of course, 
especially of the deepest and most wonder- 
ful Sacrament of unity with the Living 
Christ, the Holy Communion. 

Surely if any man believes that he runs 
the risk of being a failure in God's creation, 
unless somehow or other he lays hold of 
and brings into his own life the strong life 



154 PARABLES OF JESUS 

of the Son of Man — if he knows that this is 
the appointed means by which the life of the 
Son of Man is communicated to him, then 
his Communions cannot be merely a privi- 
lege, they become something more, a neces- 
sity. To such a man the acts of his Com- 
munion will be not isolated acts of Chris- 
tian profession but the supreme acts of all 
his life, the moments in which all his 
capacities of thought, of imagination, of 
desire, of will, are raised to their utmost 
point of intensity, because there he knows 
that they meet and mingle with the perfect 
life of Jesus Christ. 

Finally, if by faith, prayer, self-discipline 
and Sacrament we are "abiding in Christ," 
then we shall bear fruit with the simplicity 
and inevitableness with which a healthy fig- 
tree puts forth its figs. We may not always 
clearly discern the fruit ourselves. Some- 
times it is better that we should not; but it 
will be seen inwardly in the growth of 
deeper love, strengthened tranquillity, more 
steadfast joyfulness. It will be seen out- 
wardly in the attractiveness of our example, 



THE BARREN FIG-TREE 155 

in the range of our influence, in the 
perseverance and hopefulness of the service 
of our fellow-men. This is the bearing of 
fruit wherein, as our Lord tells us, the 
Father is glorified. On such a life the 
Creator, looking down, can see that it is 
good, and can rejoice in what He has made. 
Is it not a wonderful thought, almost more 
wonderful than we can dare to conceive, 
that my life might become a joy to God 
Who gave it? "Man's chief end," in the 
noble words of the Scottish Catechism, "is 
to glorify God and to enjoy Him for ever." 
Would not the words be even nobler if they 
were "to give him joy for ever"? To give 
joy to God — this is surely the most uplifting 
and inspiring ambition of life. 



THE UNJUST STEWARD 



THE UNJUST STEWARD 

S. Luke xvi. I- 1 3 

I. A STORY OF WORLDLY ACUTENESS 

This is a parable which excessive literal- 
ism has turned into a maze of subtleties. It 
has indeed difficulties of its own ; but these 
have been magnified and complicated by a 
perverted industry which has attempted to 
extort the most fantastic theories out of 
every clause. A list of the hundreds of in- 
terpretations which during all these cen- 
turies have gathered round and entangled 
in obscurity this parable of the unjust 
steward is a pathetic record of wasted in- 
genuity — pathetic, because, it represents 
such a pitiable abuse of the right reverence 
which is due to all the words of Jesus. Here, 
more perhaps than in any other parable the 



i^ PARABLES OF JESUS 

simplest will be found to be at once the 
clearest and the deepest explanation. It 
seems plain that our Lord was using a story 
of worldly acuteness— a story perhaps which 
He had heard in ordinary talk — to teach a 
lesson of spiritual prudence. The details of 
the steward's clever fraud are of no intrinsic 
importance: our Lord makes no comment 
on them. He merely takes the man's fore- 
sight and promptitude— wicked as they were 
in their application — as an illustration of 
qualities which have a necessary place in 
the spiritual life. 

II. GOD OR MAMMON 

The concluding words give the real key 
to the interpretation of the parable: *^Ye 
cannot serve God and Mammon." The test 
of every man's real value is his answer to 
the question — ^What is the ultimate aim of 
your life? Tell me what you are really 
living for and I will tell you what you are. 
In the last resort, there are but two answers 
to that supreme question: the one, God; the 



THE UNJUST STEWARD ftbi 

other, Mammon. The aim of life must be 
finally either the service of self or the ser- 
vice of God. Most men, capable of asking 
themselves the question, avoid and postpone 
the answer. But v^hile their thought delays, 
their life moves: and its main movement 
gives the answer. Every man's life — ^what- 
ever his theories may be — is gradually set- 
tling down into a final answer. To succeed 
is to look that answer fairly in the face and 
choose and concentrate all one's energies 
upon it. To fail, is to avoid it, or, worse 
still, to adopt sometimes one answer, some- 
times the other. Divided service has al- 
ways the doom of failure and futility upon 
it. He who — in the common way of speak- 
ing — tries to ^'make the best of both worlds" 
makes nothing really of either. He merely 
loses his chance of enjoying either himself 
or God. If the unjust steward had hesi- 
tated in carrying out his crime, had allowed 
scruples of conscience to hamper and hinder 
him, he would have failed hopelessly — he 
would have lost both the stewardship to 
which he had been unfaithful and the 



i^ PARABLES OF JESUS 

friends whom he had tried by his trick to 
secure. His only chance was to be prompt, 
thorough, unscrupulous; and he succeeded. 
Therefore his ^4ord commended the un- 
righteous steward because he had done 
prudently; for the sons of this world are 
for their own generation wiser, more pru- 
dent, than the sons of the light." That is, 
with reference to their own real standard 
of life, their own choice of its main motive, 
once they have made the choice, their suc- 
cess depends on the determination with 
which they act upon it. Because they 
recognize this fact, and allow no scruples 
to deter them, no half-heartedness and fear- 
fulness to trouble them, they win their ob- 
ject. And thus, in their own chosen line, 
they are an example of prudence to the 
'^sons of the light" in theirs. If these sons 
of the light really mean to choose God as 
their Master, and His service as the aim of 
their life, they should be just as whole- 
hearted, decided, and courageous. If they, 
consciously or unconsciously, try to make 
terms for themselves and their own desires, 



THE UNJUST STEWARD ij^ 

or to make compromises with the 'Svorld," 
then they are doomed to a double failure. 
They will fail to enjoy Mammon because 
their service of it will be spoiled by the 
scruples and rebukes of conscience. They 
will fail to enjoy God, because their service 
of Him will be spoiled by their indulgence 
of alien desires. 

In teaching this lesson, the parable of the 
unjust steward has a striking modern paral- 
lel in Browning's poem, ^The Statue and 
the Bust." That poem has often caused the 
same difficulties, it enforces the same truth. 
The two lovers are condemned because they 
had not the courage and w^hole-heartedness 
to stake all for the fulfilment of their love. 
Let me quote the words in which the poet 
points his moral : 

"Let a man contend to the uttermost, 
For his life's set prize, be what it will! 
The counter our lovers staked was lost 
As surely as if it were lawful coin ; 
And the sin I impute to each frustrate ghost 
Is — the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin, 
Though the end in sight was a vice, I say, 
You of the virtue (we issue join) 
How strive jou? De te, fabula!'* 



i^ PARABLES OF JESUS 

That is just our Lord's warning to us who 
wish to be the ^'sons of the light," the serv- 
ants of God. "Concerning you is the para- 
ble : how are you striving in your life's aim? 
Are you, for your generation — with refer- 
ence to your professed purpose — show- 
ing anything like the foresight, the decisive- 
ness, the tenacity of the unjust steward? 
But for your success these qualities are just 
as necessary as for his." It is a truth 
strangely forgotten but abundantly verified 
by experience, that if it is worth while to be 
religious at all, it is worth while to be 
religious "out and out." That is, after all 
— so the parable teaches us— common-sense, 
prudence. 



III. THE SECRET OF RELIGIOUS SUCCESS 

The success, then, the happiness, of 
religion depends upon its thoroughness. A 
half-heart in religion means a heavy heart. 
Why is it that so many of us who have set 
out upon the way of Christian discipleship 



THE UNJUST STEWARD i^^ 

move with steps so languid and eyes so dull, 
find on the road so much mere struggle and 
toil, so little freedom and joy? Is it not 
because we are not yet in our heart of hearts 
wholly given over to the service of God: 
because we are really keeping something 
back in our self-surrender? On the other 
hand, why is it that others, tried often even 
more severely, move along in tranquil joy, 
with some inner music lightening their 
march — those of whom Keble beautifully 
speaks — 

"There are in this loud stunning tide 
Of human care and crime 
With whom the melodies abide 

Of the everlasting chime: 
Who carry music in their heart 
Through dusky lane and wrangling mart, 
Plying their daily task with busier feet 
Because their secret souls a holy strain repeat." 

It is because their self-surrender has been 
whole-hearted. They realize our Lord's 
promise: ^'There is no man that hath left 
home, or brethren, or sisters, or mother or 
father, or children, or lands for My sake 



lM parables of JESUS 

and for the GospePs sake, but he shall re- 
ceive a hundredfold now in this time, houses 
and brethren and sisters and mothers and 
children and lands, with persecutions, and 
in the world to come eternal life." The 
success of sacrifice is always in proportion 
to its completeness. If we wish to serve 
God at all we must will to serve Him alto- 
gether. As William Law, in his wonderful 
"Serious Call," insists with impressive 
repetition, we must decide once for all and 
never falter in our decision that the one aim 
of life is to be "to seek to please God in 
everything as the best and happiest thing in 
the world." For "no servant can serve two 
masters; ye cannot serve God and Mam- 
mon." 



IV. THE USE OF THE MAMMON OF 
UNRIGTEOUSNESS 

But does this mean that we are to 
abandon the world altogether? to treat its 
duties, its business, its pursuits, its wealth 



THE UNJUST STEWARD % 

as if it were a Mammon so necessarily 
unrighteous that we can have no deal- 
ings with it? The answer of the parable is, 
No. This is the second main key to the in- 
terpretation. You will find it in verse 9, 
followed and explained by verses 10-13. ^'I 
say unto you, Make to yourselves friends out 
of this Mammon of unrighteousness, that 
when it shall fail, they may receive you 
into the enternal Tabernacles." The most 
startling paradox of our Lord's command — 
to make friendship for eternity out of this 
unrighteous Mammon — itself arrests the at- 
tention. It is as if He said, ^'Do not suppose 
that because this Mammon is itself unright- 
eous you can despise or neglect it. On the 
contrary you are to use it for your eternal 
good: you are to accept your use of it as a 
test of your faithfulness. Taken as a mas- 
ter, followed as in itself an all-sufficient ob- 
ject of life, it is unrighteous; but used as 
a servant, as an instrument for realizing the 
glory of God, it is capable of providing you 
with resources of eternal value." The 
parable is a rebuke of a false ''other world- 



\f^ PARABLES OF JESUS 

liness.'' Business, money, position — these 
are opportunities entrusted to us as stew- 
ards, for which we have to give an account 
to our Maker. The parable shows us the 
place which they have in the service of 
God. 



V. A DISCIPLINE OF FIDELITY 

They furnish a discipline of fidelity. "He 
that is faithful in a very little is faithful 
also in much, and he that is unrighteous in 
a very little, is unrighteous also in much. 
If therefore ye have not been faithful in 
the unrighteous Mammon, who will commit 
to your trust the true riches?" (verses 
10-12). To persons of a certain tempera- 
ment, it is comparatively easy to serve God 
in fine feelings, in devout meditations, in 
eager attendance at religious services, in 
conspicuous acts of charity. But it is a far 
severer test to serve God in "serving 
tables," in doing daily business thoroughly 
and cheerfully (as Stevenson says, "letting 



THE UNJUST STEWARD j^^ 

cheerfulness abound with industry"), in 
keeping a watchful eye on the relations of 
expenditure and income, in paying small 
debts promptly, in discharging with eager 
care the little, often irksome, duties of home 
and family life. But these are just the 
lesser duties by which our fitness for the 
greater duties is disciplined and tested. No 
man, who has accepted or continues in a 
post of business can plead as an excuse 
for neglecting it that he is engaged in 
religious duties. His primary religious 
duty is to do his business as well as he can. 
No woman, who is charged with the task 
of keeping her house, can plead as an ex- 
cuse for leaving it untidy or uncomfortable, 
or restless, that she is busy with "church 
work." Her primary church work is to be 
the centre of a happy home. The testimony 
to the real thoroughness of our religion, 
which is at once the hardest to earn and the 
most rigorously exacted by the observant 
world, is the testimony borne to it by our 
workaday character. Let me give a very 
simple illustration. Suppose the question 



i$a PARABLES OF JESUS 

is — "Has this young man in business the 
real signs of a vocation to the ministry?" 
Testimonials are at hand as to his devotion 
to church services, his eloquent addresses to 
children and the like. But we remain un- 
certain. Then a letter comes from his em- 
ployers : "We gladly bear testimony to the 
integrity and efficiency with which Mr. A. 
has done his work. We entrusted him lately 
with a special task requiring great applica- 
tion and persistence; and we were entirely 
satisfied with the result." That letter is of 
decisive value. It gives to the others just 
the assurance which otherwise would have 
been wanting. For — "He that is faithful 
in a very little is faithful also in much." 
Nay, we may go further. There will al- 
ways be something desultory, shifting, in- 
consistent, untrustworthy in the religious 
emotions or thoughts or labours which have 
not this solid foundation in the honest and 
faithful doing of a day's work. You may, 
for example, almost assume that a man who 
shows want of method in his business affairs 
will somehow and somewhere show want of 



THE UNJUST STEWARD iryi 

will in his religion — want of honest, single- 
eyed consistency. A sure, steadfast, pro- 
gressive spiritual life cannot be combined 
with slack and careless business habits. ^Tf 
ye have not been faithful in the unright- 
eous Mammon, who will commit to your 
trust the true riches?" 

Once again we may summon an English 
poet to enforce the lesson of this parable. 
You may remember the noble words in 
which Tennyson's King Arthur rebukes his 
knights because they forsook their vows to 
wander in quest of the vision of the Holy 
Grail and vindicates his own steadfastness 
at the post of duty. 

"And some among you hold that if the King 
Had seen the sight he would have sworn the vow: 
Not easily, seeing that the King must guard 
That which he rules, and is but as the hind 
To whom space of land is given to plough, 
Who may not wander from the allotted field 
Before his work is done; but being done, 
Let visions of the night or of the day 
Come as they will: and many a time they come. 
Until this earth he walks on seems not earth, 
This light that strikes his eyeball is not light. 



172 PARABLES OF JESUS 

This air that smites his forehead is not air 
But vision — yea, his very hand and foot — 
In moments when he feels he cannot die, 
And knows himself no vision to himself, 
Nor the high God a vision, nor that One 
Who rose again." 

His faithfulness to his immediate duty 
won for him the "true riches." 



VI. A FRIEND IN THE ETERNAL TABERNACLES 

"Mammon" is to be used, secondly, as a 
means of providing resources which will 
stand us in good stead when we pass from 
this present scene into the eternal world. 
The unjust steward knew that his gains 
were gone past recovery, but his astuteness' 
provided him with friends who would save' 
him, in the hour of his dismissal, from begn 
gary. We too know that an hour will come 
when all our Mammon — our money, com-> 
forts, successes, position — will "fail.'* 
Naked we came into the world, and naked 
we shall leave it. Dust we are and to dust 



THE UNJUST STEWARD ip 

we shall return. We cannot take with us 
beyond the grave our business or the success 
it may have gained for us, our money or the 
pleasures it may have brought. But we can 
take the good we may have won or done. 
The moral qualities with which our use of 
Mammon may have strengthened and dis- 
ciplined our character, the kindness it may 
have enabled us to show, the compassion it 
may have enabled us to realize, the self- 
sacrifice it may have enabled us to practise, 
the strength and cheer it may have enabled 
us to give to our fellows — these are secured 
for us, waiting as it were in the eternal 
world to speak for us, and to welcome us. 
It is well for us to contemplate that solitary 
journey which awaits us all when death has 
knocked at the door and summoned us 
forth. Let me quote the words of Samuel 
Rutherford: ^Take with you in your jour- 
ney what you may carry with you, your con- 
science, faith, hope, patience, meekness, 
goodness, brotherly kindness; for such 
wares as these are of great price in the high 
and new country whither ye go. As for 



174 PARABLES OF JESUS 

other things which are but this world's 
vanity and trash ... ye will do best not to 
carry them with you. Ye found them here; 
leave them here.'' Mammon itself, after 
all, is ^'but this world's vanity and trash." 
It shall fail — that is certain. It has no 
value or credit beyond the grave. But the 
good we do with it — that is laid up for us 
in the new life to which we pass, so that 
we can draw upon it when we shall be 
stripped of all our possessions. We shall 
meet it as a friend ready to receive us into 
the eternal tabernacles. 



THE UNPROFITABLE SERVANTS 



THE UNPROFITABLE SERVANTS 

S. Luke xvii. 7-10 

I. THE SENSE OF DUTY 

This parable cannot, in comparison with 
many others, claim to rank as one of the 
most important. It is very short; its rela- 
tion to the context is hard to construe. But 
it deals so directly with a characteristic 
British temperament that I venture to select 
its main lesson for special consideration. 
We need not spend time in discussing 
whether it was meant to be a caution to the 
disciples, lest they should presume upon 
their possession of the power of faith (verse 
6) ; or whether it was meant to be a de- 
scription of the Jewish religion of works in 
contrast with the new religion of faith. For 
there is no difficulty in understanding the 



178 PARABLES OF JESUS 

main lesson which our Lord enforced. It is 
that the only limit to the servant's duty is 
his master's will; that there is no point at 
which he can choose for himself to claim 
that he has done enough and is entitled to 
his ease; that the servant is always a debtor 
of service, the master is never a debtor of 
reward. And it is this lesson of which our 
British race stands in very special need. Is 
it too much to say that our Lord's conclu- 
sion comes as a surprise, that if it had been 
spoken by the average upright conscientious 
Englishman, it would have run, ^We have 
done that which was our duty to do; there- 
fore we can claim to be profitable 
servants"? 

For our race worships this sense of duty. 
It is our national idol. When on the great 
day of Trafalgar Nelson flung out his brave 
motto to the breeze, ^^England expects every 
man to do his duty," he was unfolding the 
national faith. In any audience, at any 
time, in any part of the world, the words 
go straight home to the heart of the nation. 
England expects every man to do his duty— 



UNPROFITABLE SERVANTS 179 

so speaks our national conscience. England 
gets what she expects — this we would fain 
make our national boast. May we not in 
some degree claim that the boast is just? 
Still, in the main, it is true — God grant it 
may remain true — that you can expect the 
average Englishman to do his duty. Our 
whole public life rests upon that expecta- 
tion. We need no despotism to set us in the 
right road; we do not look to any central 
office of experts to keep us straight. We en- 
trust large and free powers of self-govern- 
ment to the average conscience of the aver- 
age man. And our whole English public 
life would go to pieces unless the national 
faith had some warrant in fact. But it is, for 
the most part, abroad, where men confront 
other and less civilized nations, that this 
English ideal is best tested. In the public 
service at any rate the "white man's burden" 
is sustained by the sense of duty. A Viceroy 
of India said the other day that in the midst 
of his manifold labours he was sustained by 
a thrill of pride in the thought that a sense 
of duty, unfailing, all pervading, was the 



i8o PARABLES OF JESUS 

real motive power of the vast machinery of 
Indian Government. Deep down, unex- 
pressed, but shown by faithful acts, there is 
in most Englishmen a quiet determination 
to be just, to keep his word, to do his duty. 
Nay, may we not go further? In his mind 
the word "duty" surely stands for some- 
thing deeper than it seems to express. Sus- 
picious as he is of emotion, reserved in 
speech, duty often means to him, God. It 
is not merely that his duty is his God, but 
that his God speaks to him in his duty, and 
there is an instinct of reverence for God in 
his obedience to it. As Tennyson says in that 
great ode which is as it were a Psalm of 
Duty- 
He that, ever following her commands, 
On, with toil of heart and knees and hands, 

Through the long gorge to the far light has won 
His path upward and prevailed, 
Shall find the toppling crags of Duty scaled 
Are close upon the shining table-lands 

To which our God Himself is Moon and Sun." 

Yet in spite of all this truth there con- 
fronts us this hard saying of our Lord : ^ We 



UNPROFITABLE SERVANTS i8i 

are unprofitable servants ; we have done that 
which was our duty to do.'' 

It is plain that our Lord discerns some- 
thing wanting, some germ of danger in this 
contented devotion to duty. What is it? 
Is it not this — that duty, as it is commonly 
conceived, apart from its heroic aspect, 
tends to become simply what is expected or 
recognized by some limited and conven- 
tional standard? It is of this lower, but far 
more common type of duty, that our Lord is 
speaking in the parable. And here it is that 
we touch the defects of our British virtue; 
for in asking himself, "What is my duty?" 
the Englishman is apt to find an answer in 
the standard of public opinion by which he 
is surrounded. Duty too often means the 
average expectation in any given condition 
of life. Thus, at school, when he is a boy, 
the Englishman follows with ready and 
resolute determination all the rules and 
traditions of school life and school morality. 
He is half-ashamed and half-afraid to go 
beyond. In the army or the navy he will 
sav, as I have so often heard said to me, ^'I 



i82 PARABLES OF JESUS 

am bound to do what the service requires, 
and to do it well ; but when it comes to my 
private conduct, that is a matter entirely of 
my own concern.'' In business the code of 
right and wrong becomes too easily what is 
done by the average good firm. Is it not, 
on the lips of men we meet, a frequent 
apology, "I do what is expected of a man in 
my position"? He refuses, he scorns, to go 
beneath the accepted opinion of his class; 
but he is afraid to rise above it. 

11. THE LIMITATIONS OF THE SENSE 
OF DUTY 

There are two ways in which this real 
defectiveness of the sense of duty shows 
itself. The one is that it limits and narrows 
the life. It keeps it, indeed, within fixed 
and safe barriers, but the safety and the ease 
are had at the cost of progress. You see 
the average good Englishman, upright and 
honourable. You like and respect him, 
yet, somehow, he suggests an arrested 
possibility. He is so suspicious of enthusi- 



UNPROFITABLE SERVANTS 183 

asm that he becomes incapable of it; so 
distrustful of ideals that he would rather 
do without them. He prefers the safety of 
the beaten track to the perils and glories of 
the open hill. He is content to say, "Well, 
at least, we are profitable servants : we have 
done that which was our duty to do." You 
like him, you respect him, you trust him : 

"Only he knows not God, 
Nor all that chivalry of His 
The soldier saints who row on row 
Burn upward each to his point of bliss." 

And the second defect which goes with 
this common conception of duty is a certain 
self-satisfaction. The standard is satisfied : 
the requirement is met; the expectation is 
answered. What more can be asked? Thus 
we notice a certain smoothness of compla- 
cency sinking down upon the average duti- 
ful man. How hard and impenetrable that 
smooth surface may become they best know 
who have tried to approach such a man 
at the close of life with the strange 
memory of the cross or with the appeal for 



i84 PARABLES OF JESUS 

some sign of penitence. For ten who will 
say on reviewing the course of their life, 
*We have done that which was our duty to 
do," there is barely one who will add, ^'We 
are unprofitable servants." When we see 
the narrowness and self-satisfaction that 
somehow or other spoils the dutiful man, we 
realize how near the best of us may come to 
the Pharisee of the New Testament. 
^There is always," said an eminent French 
critic, "there is always a touch of the 
Pharisee in the good Englishman." That, 
too, is a hard saying. We resent it. Is it 
harder than the saying of our Lord in the 
parable? The spirit of pharisaism is wide. 
It ranges from the lowest forms in which 
instinctively we dislike it up to the highest, 
in which it comes to have even a certain 
attractiveness. When we meet the Pharisee 
who says in the tone of his voice or the 
posture of his figure, "Thank God, I am 
not as other men are, or even as this pub- 
lican," we know that his spirit is funda- 
mentally wrong. But when we meet a rich 
young man, eager to do what is right, asking 



UNPROFITABLE SERVANTS 185 

quite sincerely, ^What must I do to inherit 
eternal life?" and then saying with honest 
frankness, ^'AU these commandments have 
I kept from my youth up," then we like 
him, we admire him. It is indeed in the 
rich young ruler of the New Testament that 
the most attractive type of English charac- 
ter finds itself, as it were, mirrored, and 
there it is both loved and judged. 'Then 
Jesus, beholding him, loved him, and said 
unto him, One thing thou lackest: go thy 
way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to 
the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in 
heaven; and come, take up thy cross and 
follow Me." 

III. THE NEED OF AN INWARD IDEAL 

What then do we need to redeem this 
great sense of duty from its dangers? We 
need an inward personal ideal rising ever 
above the conventional standards of expec- 
tation. The inner spirit must refuse to ac- 
cept limits from the outward circumstances 
of class or profession, but move past them 



i86 PARABLES OF JESUS 

on a quest of its own. It is thus that the 
spirit keeps its liberty, and moulds and 
masters the conditions by which it is sur- 
rounded, instead of allowing itself to be 
mastered and moulded by them. And where 
there is liberty there is the possibility of 
progress. It is only by the power of a free 
inward ideal that character expands and 
grows. Moreover, thus capable of pro- 
gress, such a character is incapable of self- 
satisfaction. A man who is determined in 
his own inward life to be the best that he 
can be can never fold his hands and say 
complacently, ''I am a profitable servant; I 
have done that which it was my duty to do." 
If we can say "all these commandments 
have I kept," we are only at the best "not 
far from the Kingdom of God." As soon as 
we take the path of ceaseless effort and 
sacrifice, we enter within it. 

IV. THE INFINITE CLAIM OF GOD 

The sense of duty to be complete needs 
the recognition of the infinite claim of an 



UNPROFITABLE SERVANTS 187 

infinite God. We come back to the old 
truth — "The soul is made for God and can 
find its rest only in Him." That quest of 
the inward ideal, that impatience with 
every stage of attainment, is God's drawing 
of the soul into fellowship with Himself. 
It may be that the spirit in its own inward 
journey realizes the need of God, and 
through the earnestness of that sense of 
need finds its way to Him. It may be that 
God Himself using some experience or in- 
fluence of a man's life, lays hold upon him 
and bids him go forth to follow His leading 
to the end. In either case, it is this recog- 
nition of the infinite claim of an infinite 
God which redeems and transforms the 
sense of duty. There can then be no danger 
of halting and stopping short, for God's 
claims summon us to a never-ending prog- 
ress towards union with Himself. There 
can be no danger of self-satisfaction, for 
God's own perfection is the goal, and at 
every stage we realize how far short of it 
we come. The more we realize that God 
Himself is the End for which He has given 



i88 PARABLES OF JESUS 

us our being the more conscious we become 
of the presence of rival aims and of our 
manifold surrenders to them; and thus the 
sense of imperfection deepens into the sense 
of sin. It is our sin which entangles and 
impedes the soul in its true movement to- 
wards God and which bars the way to God's 
gracious movement towards us, and thus 
prevents the union of God and man for 
which we were made. But there is nothing 
in the mere sense of sin which avails either 
to remove its burden from the conscience or 
to break its power over the will. It is here 
that one welcomes with ever renewed 
thankfulness the knowledge that One in 
whom God and man were perfectly at one 
obtained, by a '^fuU and sufficient" sacrifice 
of obedience, forgiveness for all sin, and has 
brought into our life the strength of a vic- 
torious will of good; and that if only a man 
by faith and prayer and sacrament and self- 
sacrifice keeps hold upon Him, he is as- 
sured alike of that pardon and of that 
power. It is this encompassing security 
which brings into the long struggle out of 



UNPROFITABLE SERVANTS 189 

self to God a sense of sureness and of peace. 
Being cleansed from sin we can serve God 
with a quiet mind. 

I. THE PERFECT SENSE OF DUTY 

What we need to redeem and perfect the 
sense of duty is to remember that beyond 
what any standard of human opinion ex- 
pects, beyond what ''England expects," re- 
mains what God expects ; that God can ex- 
pect nothing less than the union of our 
mind and will with His ; that this expecta- 
tion can only be met by that entire sacrifice 
of body, soul and spirit which is after all 
our reasonable service; that to this Divine 
expectation we are kept true by the sense of 
our own unworthiness, which leads us ever 
to plead the atonement and to accept the 
grace of Christ our Lord. It is only to him 
who honestly confesses 'Sve are unprofitable 
servants; we have only done that which w^as 
our duty to do," that, after long service, is 
assured the Master's praise: "Well done, 
good and faithful servant" 



I90 PARABLES OF JESUS 

I cannot better sum up the thought given 
to us by this parable than by quoting the 
words, adapted from the ancient hymn of 
Cleanthes, in which a great and typical 
Englishman, William Stubbs, Bishop of 
Oxford, a man reserved in speech, almost 
morbid in his English dislike of emotional 
display, devoted to the sense of duty, reveals 
the secret of his humility and of his 
strength — 

''Lead me, Almighty Father, Spirit, Son, 
Whither Thou wilt, I follow, no delay, 

My will is Thine, and even had I none, 
Grudging obedience still I will obey. 

Faint-hearted, fearful, doubtful if I be, 

Gladly or sadly I will follow Thee. 

''Into the land of righteousness I go, 

The footsteps thither Thine and not my own, 
Jesu, Thyself the way, alone I know. 

Thy will be mine, for other have I none. 
Unprofitable servant though I be, 
Gladly or sadly let me follow Thee." 



THE FRIEND AT MIDNIGHT AND 
THE UNJUST JUDGE 



THE FRIEND AT MIDNIGHT AND 
THE UNJUST JUDGE 

S, Luke XI. 5-8 and xviii. i-8 



I. FROM MAN TO GOD 

These two parables are closely akin. 
They make the same comparison and con- 
trast between what we expect of human 
nature even in unworthy types and what we 
may expect of God. They draw the same 
inference that God in His goodness will 
not come short of that expectation which 
we have of our fellowmen even in their 
unworthiness. They enforce this same 
lesson that in order to make sure of God's 
answers our prayers must be intense and 
persistent. 



194 PARABLES OF JESUS 

Consider that comparison and contrast 
and the inference which is drawn from it. 
As in the parable of the unjust steward, 
our Lord chooses the example not of the 
best but of the most ordinary, indeed un- 
worthy, men to emphasize His argument. 
He illustrates the point of His own saying, 
"If ye then being evil know how to give 
good gifts unto your children, how much 
more shall your Heavenly Father give good 
things to them that ask Him." Here He 
takes certain men "being evil," the churlish 
friend and the unjust judge, shows the con- 
duct of which under certain circumstances 
they are capable, and asks whether under 
similar circumstances God Himself, the 
Loving and the Righteous, will not prove 
to be at least as generous and just. In this, 
we might almost say surprising, way, our 
Lord gives His sanction to the belief that 
we can learn of God from what we know of 
man; that at least the moral attributes of 
love, justice, mercy, sympathy in God are 
not different from, but only infinitely tran- 
scend, what we know these attributes to be 



THE FRIEND AT MIDNIGHT 195 

in man. In the education of Israel the in- 
spired prophets had indeed rebuked men 
for transferring their own ignorant and 
partial thoughts to God. They had held up 
to scorn the false gods clothed with the 
qualities of ordinary human nature. They 
insisted that God's ways and thoughts are 
not as the thoughts and ways of man; for 
they far transcended the compass of man's 
mind and imagination. But these very 
champions of God's transcendence never 
hesitated to represent Him as having to- 
wards His people the feelings of love, of 
jealous care, of righteous indignation, 
which a father has towards his children or a 
husband towards his wife, or a judge to- 
wards the wrongdoer. Even in the pagan 
deification of the qualities which men most 
admired in their own fellows, still more 
in some of the deeper thoughts of the 
religions of India, we can see the instinct 
of man's spirit which believes that the 
Divine Being has at least that affinity 
with man which makes intercourse be- 
tween them possible. Philosophy insists 



196 PARABLES OF JESUS 

that the mind of which the universe is the 
expression cannot be less rational in its 
methods than the mind of man. Religious 
thought at its highest point insists that if 
Love is the noblest quality of man there 
must be in God a Love not less but infinitely 
more noble and true. Indeed, if the evolu- 
tion of the universe reaches its highest stage 
in man, there would be an arrest, an inex- 
plicable failure, in the upward movement 
unless ^4n completed man began anew a 
tendency to God"— unless manhood at its 
highest could rise to God and find itself ful- 
filled there. Thus the Incarnation, though, 
as we say, "miraculous" in the method of 
its coming, is no mere isolated marvel. It is 
God's supreme vindication of man's inevit- 
able instinct of expectation that man can 
hold communion with God, because there is 
that in God which is in common with man. 
The Incarnation, indeed, lifts the thought 
to a higher and truer standpoint: so that it 
does not rise from man to God so much as 
descend from God to man. In the light of 
that revelation the higher attributes of man 



THE FRIEND AT MIDNIGHT 197 

are seen to be the reflections in him of the 
Perfection of God; the}^ are the tokens not 
only of manhood in God but rather of 
Godhead in man. 

But such thoughts carry us far beyond the 
purposes of these simple papers. And after 
all, the teaching of Jesus here, as always, is 
practical not speculative. His object is 
simply to impress upon men the conviction 
that the kindness and justice which they 
expect of their fellows, even the least 
worthy, they may with infinitely greater 
confidence expect of their Father in 
Heaven. It is perhaps worth while to 
pause here to notice at least two ways — one 
of presumption, the other of distrust — in 
which we are very apt to neglect this truth. 



II. THE JUSTICE OF GOD 

In the first place we forget it often in 
presuming upon the forbearance of Divine 
justice. Consider seriously the course of 
our inward life — the acts repeated over and 



198 PARABLES OF JESUS 

over again of disobedience to what we know 
clearly to be God's will, the manifold be- 
trayals of trusts which He has committed 
to us, the failure of service and losses of op- 
portunity through our sloth and self-indul- 
gence. Is there any earthly master or even 
father, with any ordinary sense of justice, 
who could pass by such conduct as if it mat- 
tered nothing? And will God, the All-holy 
and All-just, be less careful and exacting 
than an ordinary man? Yet do we not go on 
with these secret sins and surrenders and self- 
indulgences, as if somehow they involved no 
serious consequences? We ought rather to 
be convinced, and to act upon the conviction, 
that unless our penitence is constant and sin- 
cere and our efforts of amendment are in- 
creasingly strenuous, these apparently undis- 
turbed acts or habits of disobedience must 
all the while be bringing upon us some real 
spiritual punishment which will be revealed 
if not here then hereafter. This would only 
be right if we were dealing with an earthly 
master, judge, or father. And "shall not 
the Judge of all the earth do right?" 



THE FRIEND AT MIDNIGHT 199 

III. THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD 

In the second place we are often apt to 
distrust the reality of the Divine Father- 
hood. There are mysteries in God's order- 
ing of the world which we cannot fathom. 
They are and must be a heavy strain upon 
our faith in His Fatherly will. Yet behind 
even these mysteries, in the ultimate motive 
and issue of things, there can be nothing 
finally inconsistent with all that we mean 
by fatherhood. And when we pass from 
these mysteries of Providence to the direct 
relations between the spirit of man and 
God, there we are to hold to that truth of 
fatherhood with quite immediate and un- 
faltering certainty. Yet are there not many 
good people who, for example in the mor- 
bid scrupulosity of their conscience, or in 
deciding the rival claims of mercy and 
ecclesiastical rules, or in considering 
the fate of the heathen, of the ignorant, 
of the vast masses who have had no 
chance of worthy life, seem to hesitate 
in this sure and simple trust? Again, we 



200 PARABLES OF JESUS 

can think of systems of religion — not only in 
past history — limiting, by rigorist views of 
Church order, or precise doctrines as to 
"predestination," God's own power of sav- 
ing His own children — systems which, for 
all their imposing aray of logic, have missed 
the essential mark of truth — consistency 
with the Fatherhood of God. And as that 
truth is the final test of religious theory, so 
it is the final stay and security of the soul. 
We cannot be too simple in our grasp of it. 
Often, under the strain of sorrow, perplex- 
ity, doubt, other anchors in which we 
trusted slip; but if the last anchor holds — 
this faith that below all depths and above 
all heights stand eternally the Will, the 
Wisdom, the Love of a Father — then we 
shall not drift; we shall be secure till the 
storm is past. 

"Then was I as a child that cries, 
But crying knows his father near." 

IV. THE IMPORTUNITY OF PRAYER 

This, then, is the point of our Lord's 
comparison — the Divine Father of all will 



THE FRIEND AT MIDNIGHT 201 

surely not come short of the grudging 
friend, nor the All-righteous One of the 
unjust judge. We pass to the main lesson 
which the two parables teach. It is given 
in the preface to that of the unjust judge, 
"that men ought always to pray and not 
to faint"; and in the conclusion to that of 
the friend at midnight, "I say unto you, 
Ask and it shall be given unto you; Seek 
and ye shall find; Knock and it shall be 
opened unto you." It is the tivo-fold 
lesson — that prayer must be patient and 
persistent and that such prayer is sure of its 
answer. 

In both parables, the stress is laid upon 
this importunity of prayer. It need scarcely 
be pointed out that the stress is not laid 
upon the reluctance with which the prayer 
is answered. God is always more ready 
to hear than we are to pray, more willing 
to give than we are to receive. The point of 
of our Lord's appeal is simply that if im- 
portunity' of prayer availed to overcome the 
reluctance of the grudging friend or of the 
unjust judge, how much more will it avail 



202 PARABLES OF JESUS 

to secure the willing response of a loving 
and just Father? But, even so, is it not a 
hard saying that such a Father should, as it 
were, require this importunity of prayer 
before He answers? It is a natural question 
often asked. Well, consider the human 
analogy. Does a wise father shower gifts 
upon his child without waiting for some 
sign that the child really deserves them, is 
able to appreciate and use them? If he 
does he only spoils his child. And would 
not one sign of such desire and capacity be 
the urgency of the child's entreaties? Thus 
importunity of prayer is the sign for which 
God's loving wisdom waits of the sincerity 
of our desire for His gifts, and of the fitness 
of our character to receive them. It is the 
evidence of desire. If our prayer be formal, 
languid, intermittent, our desire cannot be 
real and deep. And urgency of prayer is 
the evidence of fitness of character to re- 
ceive. As our Lord implies in His own 
comment on the parable of the unjust 
judge, it is a test of that co-operating faith 
which is the condition of receiving His 



THE FRIEND AT MIDNIGHT 203 

grace. He only will pray with persistence 
who really believes that God is, and that He 
is the rewarder of them that diligently seek 
him. Above all, prayer is the test of our 
willing submission to God's will. It is the 
acknowledgment of that dependence upon 
Him, the expression of that obedience, 
which is the essence of true freedom. It is 
the primary and indispensable act of son- 
ship. For all prayer is based upon one 
prayer — ^'Thy will be done." It is in its 
deepest truth the eftort, not chiefly to ob- 
tain our own desires, but to bring them into 
the Will of God and leave them there in 
perfect trust. Thus the importunity of 
prayer is a token of the resoluteness and 
strenuousness with which our will is set to- 
wards God's. To him whose will is thus 
proved to be in line with God's will, God 
can safely entrust His gifts. 

The lesson of the two parables is thus 
one aspect of that which is taught in the 
striking words — ^'The Kingdom of Heaven 
suftereth violence, and the violent take it by 
force." For that Kingdom, just because it 



204 PARABLES OF JESUS 

is the Kingdom of God, is set on high, and 
the ascent to it is steep and narrow. To 
reach it is a task beyond the compass of 
a feeble, listless, timorous spirit. It can 
only be achieved by strenuousness, intensity, 
and courage. In this upward struggle, 
increasing difficulty must be met by in- 
creasing determination. If asking be not 
answered, then we must seek; if seeking 
be unavailing, then we must knock — knock 
with the energy of one whose whole will is 
set on effecting an entrance. Archbishop 
Trench fitly quotes the great words of 
Dante : 

"Fervent love 
And lively hope, with violence assail 
The kingdom of the heavens, and overcome 
The will of the Most High : not in such sort 
As man prevails o'er man ; but conquers it 
Because 'tis willing to be conquered, still, 
Though conquered, by its mercy conquering." 

The Law of Struggle is only the Law of 
Love as it is manifested on the steeps of 
the Hill of Life. There, Love would not 
be love unless it tested, braced, and quick- 
ened the free spirit of man — gave him spurs 



THE FRIEND AT MIDNIGHT 205 

for his ascent. On the summit, but not till 
then, we shall see the same guiding Love 
transform the Law of Struggle into the 
Law of Rest. It is not, therefore, the 
sternness but the Love of God, or rather it 
is His Love manifested in sternness, which 
requires from His children the importunity 
of prayer. 

Such prayer, then, is assured of its 
answer. God hears it: its persistence, so 
to say, forces an entrance into His audience- 
chamber: and the more earnest the prayer, 
the nearer the spirit penetrates to God. 
"He heareth us: and if we know that He 
heareth us, we know that we have the 
petitions which we have asked of Him." 
The answer is not always what we asked or 
expected. In the parable of the friend at 
midnight, the response was fuller than the 
request — it was not three loaves only but 
as many as were needed. But it is not 
always so. There are often delays and 
surprises in the answer. But the one thing 
sure is that earnest prayer secures that an- 
swxr which the absolute Love and Wisdom 



2o6 PARABLES OF JESUS 

of God know to be the truest and best. 
The man of the world scoffs at this trust of 
the Christian: "If you get what you ask, 
you say it is an answer to your prayer: if 
you don't, you still say your prayer is 
answered; what then is the use of praying 
at all?" But the philosophy of the king- 
dom of God is deeper than the logic of 
the world. The Christian knows that 
what he really wishes is only what God 
wills, that God chooses to wait for the 
evidence of free submission to that will 
before it is done: and that this evidence 
is given in prayer. Let us then have a 
heart of courage and confidence in our 
prayers. "Men ought always to pray and 
not to faint." It is by the wings of prayer 
that life is lifted to God. If these wings 
are slack, the spirit will grow faint in its 
flight. If they are strong, and beat the 
air with a persistent force, then, through 
all the buffeting blasts of difficulty and 
perplexity, the spirit will keep its course 
in patience, impelled and sustained by the 
will of God, 



THE FRIEND AT MIDNIGHT 207 

V. THE NEED OF INTERCESSORY PRAYER 

There are some special features in each 
of the two parables as to which a few 
words may be added. In the parable of 
the Friend at Midnight, the request is 
made on behalf of another — of the traveller 
who arrives unexpectedly. We need not 
dwell on the possible occult meanings which 
subtlety of interpretation may extract out of 
the relations of the traveller and his host. 
But we shall be true to the spirit of the 
parable if we learn from it the need of 
earnest intercessory prayer in our dealings 
with men with whom in any way our lot is 
cast. No one can look back upon his life 
without marvelling at the mystery of human 
intercourse. People, we say, ''come into 
our lives," from all sorts of life-journeys, 
unexpected, uninvited. It is an experience 
which will become more and more common 
as modern life grows in complexity. There 
is a widespread restlessness of mind and of 
body which drives men forth from the set- 
tled homes of custom. There are more 



2o8 PARABLES OF JESUS 

travellers in the region of the spirit, as over 
the face of the globe, than there used to be. 
May we not say that now in every circle of 
friends, nay in every home, there is a society 
of travellers, each engaged in some journey 
of his own, of which the others are perhaps 
ignorant, and in which they cannot follow 
him? If there is any human hospitality in 
our characters, such travellers will often 
arrive at our doors, unexpected, perhaps 
out of the unknown, when we are least 
ready for them, asking us for strength, for 
refreshment, for rest in their journey. Here 
arrives one in great moral perplexity asking 
for advice; another, in the lonely wander- 
ing of sorrow, asking for comfort; another, 
who has lost his way in doubt, asking for 
light; or, in the words of S. Augustine, 
"perchance there cometh some wearied 
friend of thine, who, worn out amid all the 
desires and the poverty of the world, comes 
to thee as to a Christian and says, ^Give me 
an account of it, make me a Christian.' " 
May we not say that an unexpected travel- 
ler is knocking at the door when the mother 



THE FRIEND AT MIDNIGHT 209 

hears a sudden and troubled question come 
from the lips of her child; or when a man 
discerns in quiet talk a new note of sadness 
or of entreaty in the voice of his old friend? 
And alas! often when the traveller comes 
we ^'have nothing to set before him." We 
are taken unawares : our minds have been 
asleep: our own spirit is tired: our stock 
of provender, always scanty enough for our 
own soul's need, is for the moment ex- 
hausted. What are w^e to do? We cannot 
turn the traveller from our door: but it is 
useless to keep him waiting with barren 
words: he has come for bread. In such a 
strait — and who is there who does not or 
may not find himself in it? — there is but one 
thing to do. We must go at once — at the 
very midnight of the unexpected arrival — 
to the Friend in Whose treasures there is 
provision for the needs of every human 
soul. We must rouse Him by the earnest- 
ness of our prayer, and ask Him to give the 
bread which we lack. I know by abundant 
experience that it has made all the differ- 
ence in helping those who have asked for 



2IO PARABLES OF JESUS 

help whether or not one has immediately 
gone with their need to God. One who 
exercised great influence for good at Cam- 
bridge has even said that he almost gave up 
much talking to those whom he wished to 
help in order that he might devote the time 
to what he found far more effective — much 
praying for them. It is indeed best to have 
something of our own which we can set 
before these life-travellers who come to us 
' — a sympathy trained to be discerning, a 
frankness which is willing for another's sake 
to speak of self, or — in these days especially 
— some real knowledge of the Christian 
Faith, and some ability to give at least that 
reason for it which has convinced ourselves. 
But even then we have need of prayer that 
we may present what we have in the way 
and with the tact which will best commend 
it, above all that we may secure the aid of 
that Holy Spirit without Whom no words 
of ours can go home to another's heart or 
mind or conscience. Constant prayerfulness 
keeps the spirit in readiness for these sud- 
den demands and enables it to meet them, 



THE FRIEND AT MIDNIGHT 211 

It was said of the Spanish mystic, Juan de 
Avila, that ''he seemed always as if he had 
just issued forth from a long and fervent 
prayer, and his very look was enough to 
edify men." The spirit of prayer is the 
secret of influence. And remember, once 
again, that prayer for others must be 
insistent and persistent. It is the mother 
who prays with the constancy of a Monica 
who wins her son for God. It is the man 
who inwardly wrestles with God for his 
friends, who becomes a Prince in influence 
over them and prevails. 



VI. THE CRY OF THE TEMPTED 

In the parable of the Unjust Judge, the 
entreaty of the widow is a cry of urgent 
personal need — "Avenge me of mine 
adversary." Is it not also the cry of many 
a soul under the pressure of relentless 
temptation? Many of us know that beyond 
the temptations to which every man is 
exposed there are some which attack us in 



212 PARABLES OF JESUS 

our special temperaments, histories, cir- 
cumstances, with special frequency and 
ferocity. Doubtless, alas! it is because long 
ago we surrendered the first ramparts that 
the attack is now constant in the very citadel 
of the heart. But even when we have come 
to repudiate the suggestions of evil, they 
still beset and torment us. And when we 
think of the ingenuity of the assault, of the 
insight which it discloses into the weak 
points of our armoury of character, we are 
driven to the conclusion that the enemy is 
as personal as, and far more intelligent 
than, ourselves. The prayer, ^^Deliver us 
from the Evil One," interprets our ex- 
perience better than the prayer, "Deliver 
us from evil." Sore beset and worried with 
the ceaseless conflict, we cry out, "Thou 
God to Whom vengeance belongeth show 
Thyself — avenge me of mine adversary." 
If this struggle be our lot, let us take heart 
from the lesson of the parable. "Shall not 
God avenge His elect which cry day and 
night unto Him?" Both the true reading 
and the exact meaning of the words which 



THE FRIEND AT MIDNIGHT 213 

follow (verse 7) are uncertain. But we may 
rightly paraphrase them thus: — Though 
He seems to hold His vengeance over them 
under a long delay, yet in truth He will 
avenge them, and that speedily. In point of 
time, the delay may seem long — all our life 
on this side of death we may be in the com- 
bat. But in point of fulfilment of God's 
will for us, the deliverance will come 
"speedily," that is, at the very moment at 
which the great Commander, in His plan 
for our immortal destiny, sees that the time 
for our release has come. Till then, we 
have to keep our post. But the time will 
come when God will relieve the guard, and 
His sentinel can say, "Now lettest Thou 
Thy servant depart in peace." Meanwhile, 
our orders are, "Watch and pray." We are 
to prove our vigilance by the constancy of 
our prayer. Indeed, even now, persistent 
prayer will be our best defence. For he 
who at the very moment of temptation turns 
at once to God in prayer — "Now, O Lord, 
now avenge me of mine adversary," cannot, 
while he is praying, at the same time be 



214 PARABLES OF JESUS 

yielding. It is in and by the word of prayer 
that the Sword of the Spirit is kept firmly 
in his hand. 



VII. THE CRY OF THE CHURCH MILITANT 

Again, the prayer in the parable is the 
cry of the ''Church Militant here in earth," 
in its age-long struggle with the ''powers of 
this world." The Church is charged by its 
Head with the task of overcoming the 
world by bringing it into subjection to the 
Kingdom of God. Certainly the victory 
seems to be far off. The Church in the 
thick of the battle, say in the midst of one of 
our great modern cities, seems scarcely to 
hold its own, much less to prevail, against 
the forces of evil and indifference. It is 
easy to despair, at least to give way to de- 
pression, to be content with endurance and 
give up the hope of victory. The one 
supreme remedy for the Church is to set 
itself to unremitting intercession with God. 
It is here that we specially see the provi- 



THE FRIEND AT MIDNIGHT 215 

dential purpose which has preserved the 
old Psalms to be the camp-songs of the 
Christian army. From them, in every 
variety of tone, the cry is ever rising — 
^'Avenge me of mine adversaries." It is 
persistence of intercession that alone can 
keep the Church true to its task, quicken 
its harassed faith, and sustain its drooping 
spirit. For if it is thus "instant in prayer," 
it comes within the promise, "Shall not God 
avenge His elect which cry day and night 
unto Him? I tell you that He will avenge 
them speedily." God knows His own time: 
it will come, and when it comes, the faithful 
Church will see the victory once achieved 
in the hidden spiritual world on the Cross 
of Christ made manifest before angels and 
men. 

These, no doubt, are bold words, and, as 
I write them, the warning with which Jesus 
closes the parable meets the eye. "Never- 
theless, when the Son of Man cometh shall 
He find faith on the earth?" Shall He find 
His Church after all these centuries of 
waiting still proving its faith by the fer- 



2i6 PARABLES OF JESUS 

vour of its prayer? Shall He find it 
still praying with unfaltering faith, and 
steadfast will, in spite of all the evidences 
of the power and persistence of evil, "Thy 
Kingdom come on earth?" Or shall He 
find that its intercessions have become a 
mere hollow sound of rhetoric out of which 
any real expectation of answer has van- 
ished? It is a question which we may well 
lay to heart; and rather than give any 
confident answer, offer the humble prayer, 
"Lord increase our faith." 



THE PHARISEE AND THE 
PUBLICAN 



THE PHARISEE AND THE 
PUBLICAN 

S, Luke xviii. 9-14 



I. THE SENSE OF SIN 

Of the parables of our Lord, that of the 
Pharisee and the Publican is one of the 
shortest and most searching. It is a picture 
of the inner and secret life of man, as it is 
laid bare before the absolute Truth. It 
teaches a fundamental lesson, which must 
be known and grasped before any other 
lesson of the Christian life can be really 
understood or fruitfully followed. The les- 
son is that one of the foundations of charac- 
ter must be a personal sense of sin. 

Life is the sum of our relationships. Our 
life is true and right, just in proportion as 



220 PARABLES OF JESUS 

our relationships with ourselves, our fel- 
lows, the world, and God, are right and 
true. There can be no question that, of all 
these complex relationships, the deepest 
and the most important is that in which we 
stand towards God. He is the unity of all 
the rest; and, therefore, the very basis of 
our life, without which it can have no 
security, is the attitude in which in our 
inmost souls we stand towards Him. To be 
wrong there, is to be wrong utterly. It is 
the one fatal error. To be right there is, 
ultimately, to be right everywhere. It is 
the one final truth. 

Now we know what our relationship 
with God ought to be. Our conscience, 
trained by the long centuries of God's disci- 
pline of this race, knows that our relation- 
ship with Him is meant to be that of sons 
living in free independence upon a Father, 
finding more and more in obedience to Him 
their perfect freedom, in knowledge of 
Him their eternal life, in love of Him their 
all-sufficing peace and joy. That filial 
union is the true meaning of our life. That 



PHARISEE AND PUBLICAN 221 

is what we are meant to be. The conscience 
of each one assures us that as a matter of 
fact, it is not what we are. Something has 
intervened, has broken and disturbed this 
unity. It is the force which we call sin. 
Sin in its essence is self-will, self-satisfac- 
tion, the assertion of independence of God. 
God's will for us — union with Himself — 
that is our Eden. Self-will — that is our 
Adam. For "every man is the Adam of his 
own soul." Union with God — that is life. 
Separation from God — that is death. And 
sin is within us as a disease which is gradu- 
ally, and most certainly alienating us from 
the life of God and bringing us towards 
death. We are all infected by it. There- 
fore, the first step to any recovery of our 
true life is to recognize both the presence 
and the gravity of sin. To confess our 
sin, to be penitent, to be anxious about 
salvation — that is nothing morbid or un- 
real; it is only the honesty which faces the 
fact. It is the first essential of health. No 
man is healthy, or can be healthy, until he 
has learned to confess his sin. For without 



222 PARABLES OF JESUS 

the sense of sin, we are making a mistake in 
the primary relationship of life. Nothing 
can go well with us until we have dealt with 
ourselves honestly there. '^If we say that 
we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and 
the truth is not in us." 



II. OUR LORD'S TREATMENT OF SIN 

It is characteristic of our Lord's — shall 
we dare to say? — original and most search- 
ing treatment of sin, that in the parable 
before us He selects as the type of the man 
involved in this great mistake not the open 
and avowed sinner, not the thoughtless man 
of the world, but the conscientious and ex- 
emplary professor of religion. Here is a 
man, not only of conspicuous integrity and 
probity of life, but a man who gives more 
than ordinary signs of his devoutness. He 
fasts twice in the week; he gives a tenth 
part of all that he gets to God. And yet, 
this man carries his sin into his very 
religion. His religion — not his mind or his 



PHARISEE AND PUBLICAN 223 

flesh — but his religion, is the sanctuary of 
his sin. The sin reveals itself in his very 
prayer. His prayer is an act of self-con- 
gratulation. The real tragedy of the man 
is that his plight is worse than that of the 
open and avowed sinner. For his sin is in 
his very soul. There is no hope for him; 
for the one great lie — that utter untruthful- 
ness to eternal facts which is involved in 
any sort of self-satisfaction — is lodged in his 
inmost spirit. 

We turn to the other — the publican; a 
miserable object, doubtless, a member of a 
discredited class. We see him standing afar 
oflf, with downcast eyes, beating his breast, 
groaning in the bitterness of his soul, "God, 
be merciful to me, a sinner.'' He is con- 
scious that he wishes to be nearer to God, 
but that he is hopelessly far from Him. He 
knows that only the pitiful mercy of God 
can possibly reach and raise him. And yet, 
just because he is self-condemned and 
owns his utter dependence upon the mercy 
of God, for that reason, there is an infinity 
of hope for him. In his inmost spirit there 



224 PARABLES OF JESUS 

lies the one great truth. He goes down to 
his house justified. 

i There is no question that this way of 
thinking and speaking is not congenial to 
our modern religious temperament. We do 
not naturally think and speak in a severe 
way about the fact of sin. It is related of 
that great Christian, Mr. Gladstone, that 
he was once asked what was the great want 
of modern life, and that he replied slowly 
and reflectively — ^we can almost hear him 
saying it — "Ah, a sense of sin; that is the 
great want of modern life." 

When we turn back to the life and letters 
of those from whom we have inherited the 
great traditions alike of the Evangelical 
and of the Catholic Revival, we are startled, 
we are almost shocked, by the strength and 
severity of their language about sin. We 
feel that it must be exaggerated, it is so 
strangely unlike anything that we can bring 
ourselves in these days to use; and yet they 
had a depth, an earnestness, a steadfastness 
of character, a devotion to our Lord, a sense 
of the Divine Love, which are strangely 



PHARISEE AND PUBLICIX 225 

lacking in us who speak so easily about our 
sins. 

The truth is that man's conception of 
God is always coloured by his own habits 
of thought and feeling, and it may be that 
we have come to think of God as exhibiting 
upon a vast scale the sort of easy compas- 
sionate indulgence which we claim for our- 
selves and extend to others. We have 
isolated and exaggerated the great truth of 
the Fatherhood of God, robbed it of its 
strength and power, and concentrated our- 
selves only upon what is easy and comfort- 
able to us in the thought. We have turned 
away, by a sort of instinct, from all that 
makes the New Testament what it is — 
stern, searching, and severe. 

III. GOD AS LAW 

If this be so, then plainly what we need 
for recovery of the sense of sin is the 
recovery of a truer conception of God in 
His relation to human life. First of all, 
we must learn to look upon God as Lau. 



226 PARABLES OF JESUS 

The law of which our conscience, in its 
strangely imperative voice, bears witness is 
the expression of the holiness and will of a 
Personal Being. This moral law is not 
something which God Himself can set aside 
with a sort of large-hearted generosity. It 
is part of Himself. It is related — and I 
would ask you to remember and think upon 
the phrase — of the great Bishop Butler, 
that he said in his last moments, "It is an 
awful thing to appear before the Moral 
Governor of the World." "The Moral 
Governor of the World." We must recover 
this sense of the awful source and sanctity 
of the voice of conscience. To neglect or 
defy its warnings, to refuse its calls, must 
involve some real and inevitable retribu- 
tion, because it is part of the inviolable law 
of the Universe. We know the consequence 
of trifling with the law of gravitation. Can 
we imagine the consequences not only for 
time, but for eternity, of trifling with the 
moral law, of those excuses, evasions, and 
silencings of conscience of which you and I 
are guilty every day? 



PHARISEE AND PUBLICAN 227 



IV. GOD AS LIFE 

We must recover the sense of God as 
Life. Do we really believe that true life 
can only be realized through union of will 
and mind with God? Then surely we 
must see in the habits which acts of sin 
have formed, in the tendencies within us of 
selfishness, of self-conceit, of jealousy, of 
uncharitableness, of impurity, of ambition, 
forces which are inevitably separating us at 
this moment from life, the true life in God 
— forces which, if they are not sternly 
checked and controlled may — nay, must — 
ultimately withdraw us wholly from Him; 
and to be separated from God is the outer 
darkness and the death. 

You watch the working of a germ of 
disease in the human body: for a long 
time its influence is scarcely marked; the 
other members of the body discharge their 
functions naturally and freely; there is the 
full capacity of sensation, of thought, of 
action; but at last, and too often without 



zzS PARABLES OF JESUS 

warning, the disease reaches some vital 
point and all is over. In the same way our 
desires, thoughts, habits of evil, may go on 
for years combined with a sense of honour, 
with probity of life, even with reality of 
prayer and acts of communion with God; 
but unless they are dealt with and con- 
trolled, sooner or later — and the pity of it 
is we cannot tell when — they may reach the 
vital point, and then the spirit falls from 
God Who alone is its life. ^The soul that 
sinneth it shall die." 



V. GOD AS LOVE 

We must also recover the sense that God 
is Love, "Ah!" some may say, "here we 
come upon a welcome corrective to all these 
harsh and gloomy thoughts. A loving God 
will never allow any of His children to slip 
away wholly from Him. He Who is all- 
powerful and loving will surely bring all 
His children back to Him." But, in truth, 
a just sense of the Love of God can only 



PHARISEE AND PUBLICAN 229 

deepen the sense of sin. We dare not find 
an analogy to the Love of God in the toler- 
ant good nature, which even we know to be 
an abuse of human love. We cannot ignore 
the responsibility which He Himself has 
entrusted to us. He will give every man 
every chance which Love can justly give: 
but, unless our freedom is a delusion, there 
may be a chance which is the last. Nay, 
let us go further and deeper. It is when 
we think of what the Love of God really 
means that we begin to understand the 
meaning of our sin. If a child by some act 
of wilfulness offends a merely indulgent 
father, then from his easy tolerance the 
child can learn nothing of the gravity of its 
offence. But if it offends a father, part of 
whose love is a high ideal to which he 
yearns that the child should rise, then in 
the pain on his face, in the tremor in his 
voice, the child learns the meaning of its 
sin. If forgiveness be given, forgiveness 
which plainly cost so much is one which 
must leave a deep sense of shame and sor- 
row, and an eager desire never to offend 



230 PARABLES OF JESUS 

again. So the Love of God which broods 
over each of His children is the Love of an 
awful Holiness — a Love which is itself a 
hatred of sin. If conscience fail to bring 
this truth home to us, then turn from con- 
science to the Cross of Christ. In that 
silent, unapproachable, awful suffering we 
can see the measure alike of the Love of 
God and of the guilt of man. 

But, thanks be to God, the Cross which 
tells me the measure of my sin tells me also 
the news of my forgiveness, and it is only 
when I have realized the shame of the first 
message that I can realize the joy and 
wonder of the second. When I know what 
my sin costs the Love of God I cannot 
dismiss it by lightly saying, 'Well, then, I 
will try to do better." What is there in my 
poor and ignorant penitence which can 
avail to overcome the wrath of Divine Love 
against my sin? What is there in my 
maimed and feeble will which God can 
accept as a sacrifice of obedience? It is 
when I am driven to ask these questions that 
I understand the wonder of the answer — 



PHARISEE AND PUBLICAN 231 

"Behold the Lamb of God which taketh 
away the sins of the world." 

There is mystery here which I cannot 
fathom; but there is also satisfaction of my 
need which I could not have invented and 
which is warranted by centuries of human 
experience. It means that there is One, not 
apart from me, but joined to me by the ties 
of a common humanity, One in Whom I 
find myself, with Whose perfect sacrifice I 
can unite mine, poor and unworthy as it is. 
If my manhood is, by sincere desire and 
will, merged in His, then under Its shelter I 
can draw near to God. For He Who is the 
Son of Man is also Son of God — the expres- 
sion of His Holy Love. Therefore, I know 
that in the offer which He makes to me of 
His own atoning sacrifice there is eternal 
and inviolable security. It is only when I 
can fall down to make the plea of "God be 
merciful to me a sinner" that I can rise to 
claim the possession of a Personal Saviour. 



THE PRODIGAL SON 



THE PRODIGAL SON 

5. Luke XV. 11-32 

I. THE GOSPEL WITHIN THE GOSPEL 

We now reach the parable which may 
well be called the greatest of them all. To 
use the true and often quoted phrase, it is 
Evangelium in Evangelio — the Gospel 
within the Gospel. Unerring sureness of 
touch and faultless simplicity of language 
and imagery, these we have seen to be the 
literary characteristics of all the parables, 
and in these the parable of the Prodigal 
Son is supreme. Regarded as a mere frag- 
ment of human literature, it is an incom- 
parable expression of the patience and 
generosity with which human love bears 



236 PARABLES OF JESUS 

with and triumphs over human wilfulness 
and folly. But to the Christian, who knows 
Who it was Who told it, and of Whom it 
was told, it is something infinitely deeper. 
It is, as it were, a very sacrament of the 
Eternal Love of God. Not merely are we 
permitted to see in the generous love of a 
human father a distant type of the attitude 
of God towards His children; rather, the 
Eternal Father, "of Whom every father- 
hood in the world is named," speaking 
through the eternal "Word," Himself 
breathes through this story of the assurance 
and the appeal of His own patient and all- 
embracing Love. It is this, so to say, sacra- 
mental presence of the Love of God in the 
story which gives it its immortal power. It 
is a parable to be appropriated by the spirit 
rather than expounded in words. The 
attempt seems vain indeed to give any new 
exposition of it. The whole experience of 
the Christian life for nineteen centuries is 
its living commentary. We can only hope 
by recalling it reverently to our minds, by 
the use it may be of some fresh turn of 



THE PRODIGAL SON 237 

thought or phrase, to renew and deepen its 
hold upon the heart and conscience. 

Doubtless it was at the moment intended 
to be a rebuke to the Pharisees and scribes, 
who had murmured, saying, 'This man 
receiveth sinners and eateth with them!" 
Doubtless it had a reference to the position 
which the Jew and the Gentile were to take 
in regard to the preaching of the Gospel. 
It includes these temporary references, but 
it transcends them. It is spoken to human 
experience in every age. Therefore, the 
best method of treating it will be to unfold 
the response to it of our own conscience and 
of our own great need. 



II. THE DEPARTURE FROM HOME 

The younger son ''said to his father, 
'Father, give me the portion of thy sub- 
stance that falleth to me.' " It was the 
craving of a false independence. He al- 
ready possessed in the life of the home the 
full enjoyment of all his father's substance. 



238 PARABLES OF JESUS 

Speaking later to the elder son, the father 
expressed the abundant generosity of that 
home life in the words ^'all that is mine is 
thine." The son would have been right to 
use and enjoy that substance to the full. 
But he was weary of the sense of depend- 
ence : he wished to be his own master. That 
was the beginning of his fall. And for us — 
'^God is our Home"; and in that home life 
all His gifts are freely bestowed upon us. 
We can use and enjoy them; nay, we ought. 
The marvellous endowments of our human 
nature — of the mind and of the senses, of 
love, and of beauty; all the marvels of this 
universe in which we live, which man half 
receives and half creates; these we are 
meant to know, to use, to enjoy. It is the 
very privilege of man to be able in some 
degree to ''share God's rapture" in His 
creation, to see and know that it is 'Very 
good." "All that is mine is thine." We 
are meant to "taste the joys of life," to live 
in every thought and sense vividly and 
eagerly. "Vivens homo gloria Dei" — a 
living man, living to the utmost point of 



THE PRODIGAL SON 239 

intensity, is the glory of God. But the life 
is to be realized in the home — in union 
with God the Father; conscious ever of His 
Presence, sharing His mind, and submissive 
to His Will. It is when we wish to take 
life with all its gifts and opportunities into 
our own hands, and use them apart from 
God, when we wish to be our own masters, 
that we go wrong. ''Give me the portion 
of thy substance that falleth to me" — the 
making of this claim, whether in the history 
of the race or of the individual man, is the 
Fall. Jesus in this parable only repeats and 
vindicates in simple and homely language 
the truth of an older ''parable'' — the story 
of the first chapters of the Book of Genesis. 
When in the "fretful stir" of youth, aware 
of new and clamorous desires and impatient 
of restraints, we say in our heart, ''I will 
enjoy life and have a good time in my own 
way; I will be my own master," we think 
that we are uttering the voice of our true 
and emancipated manhood; but, alas! we 
are only echoing the voice of the oldest 
delusion in the world. Some time or other 



240 PARABLES OF JESUS 

we have all made that claim; perhaps 
somewhere in our lives we are making 
it still. Every time we make it we lose 
our Eden. We leave "God, who is our 
Home." 

"And he divided unto them his living." 
The claim is allowed. The son can take 
his life and use it as he pleases, if he will. 
God will always acknowledge His own 
mysterious gift of freedom. It is needless, 
for it is useless, to ask, why? God chose to 
make among His other creatures sons — 
beings "made in His own image"; only so 
from His creation could come the free love 
and praise and obedience which alone could 
satisfy that Love which is His very Life. 
For this great end — to use human modes of 
speech — He chose the risk of man's free- 
dom. Only when we can say, "We would 
rather have been stones or trees or beasts 
than sons of God" is there any place for our 
complaints, and may we not add that this is 
something which no one who has kept any 
spark of his true manhood alight within 
b'\m would ever dare to say. "He divided 



THE PRODIGAL SON 241 

unto them his living." It is the consequence 
of the greatness of God's Love and of man's 
destiny. 



III. THE SOJOURN IN THE FAR COUNTRY 

The ^^far country," as S. Augustine 
tersely said, ^'is forgetfulness of God." It 
is that state of being which S. Paul de- 
scribed as ^'alienated from the life of God." 
There are ultimately only two states of life 
— the one centred in God, when it is obedi- 
ent to the leading of God and is moving to- 
wards Him in thought, desire, and will; the 
other, centred in self, when it resists the 
leading of God and is moving in thought, 
desire, and will away from God. Between 
these two states most men hover to and fro, 
but gradually the main motive of the will — 
God or self — carries them to the one or to 
the other. In proportion as God is becom- 
ing more and more the inspiration and the 
goal of all our activities, we realize the 



242 PARABLES OF JESUS 

home-life for which we are made, and in 
which alone we can find joy and rest. In 
proportion as that inspiration and goal are 
becoming self we are taking our journey 
into the far country. 

True, it is not always, perhaps not often, 
that a man pursues this journey recklessly 
to its last stage of degradation. Messengers 
of God — haunting memories of better days 
and better things, the examples of better 
men, rebukes of conscience, warnings in the 
spirit and in the flesh — are sent to delay or 
divert his course. But the parable describes 
the lot of human nature, choosing self and 
left to itself; and this, in order to give the 
great assurance that there is no stage in that 
mistaken journey from which a man cannot 
make his return to God and receive His 
welcome. 

In interpreting the sojourn in the far 
country it is, alas! easy for most of us to 
use the lessons of our own experience. At 
first there was the ^'riotous living" — the 
thrill of indulged sensation, the excitement 
of new and unrestricted pleasure. But soon 



THE PRODIGAL SON 243 

we learned that the resources of life were 
being wasted and spent, without any reward 
of real satisfaction. For indulgence only 
wears out the powers of enjoyment; it can- 
not satisfy them. Appetite only grows by 
what it feeds on. There is found to be, 
sooner or later, a "mighty famine," an in- 
satiable hunger, in the far country. And 
the famine leads to slavery. He who set 
out to be his own master finds himself in 
the grasp of the tyrant. For there is no 
tyranny so lawless and pitiless as the 
tyranny of self-indulgence. The mere beasts 
are protected against the excess of their 
own desires by the law of instinct. But if 
man once parts with the rule of reason and 
conscience, of God, there is no such limit 
to restrain and protect him. He knows that 
he is ruining himself, but he has sold him- 
self to a master who acknowledges no law, 
feels no pity, and gives no wages of reward. 
The money-lover must go on accumulating 
long after the joy of acquisition has passed 
away. The man of mere ambition is 
doomed to fretfulness, to the pains of 



244 PARABLES OF JESUS 

wounded pride, to the disease of envy, even 
when he knows that the hope of success 
to which he yielded himself can never 
be realized. The gambler is held in 
the vice of restless excitement. The drunk- 
ard becomes a sort of embodied thirst. The 
sensualist, struggle as he may, is the prey 
of unceasing suggestions of sin, which both 
entice and torment him, and he can neither 
resist nor satiate the gnawing pangs of lust. 
Lastly, tied as he is, hand and foot, to his 
sin, the sinner blindly obeys his master-sin, 
when it sends him into every sort of de- 
gradation. He who began by boasting "I 
will go my own way" is sent to feed swine, 
and is fain to fill his belly with the husks 
which the swine are eating. 

S. Paul, in that terrible first chapter of 
the Epistle to the Romans, holds up a 
flaming torch of judgment over the far 
country that we may see whither it leads. 
It marches with hell, for what is hell but 
this slavery to insatiable sin? ''He that 
is unjust, let him be unjust still; he that 
is filthy, let him be filthy still." For the 



THE PRODIGAL SON 245 

sinner, under the tyranny of his sin, 
^'enlarges his desires as hell, and is as 
death, and cannot be satisfied.'' I can 
never forget the words of a poor sinner who 
had just escaped from her life of sin, ^'You 
need not talk about hell: I know it; IVe 
been there for five years." 

This is the Nemesis of self-indulgence, 
of that false craving for independence. If 
we can think of any part of our life which 
we keep for ourselves and withhold from 
God, it is well for us to realize that there 
we are setting out upon the road to a far 
country where recklessness, hunger, slavery, 
degradation, death await us. ^What fruit 
had ye then at that time in the things 
whereof ye are now ashamed? For the end 
of these things is death." 



IV. THE RETURN 

At last ^^he came to himself." So we 
read of the prodigal in the parable. It is 
a profound word. Deep down within every 



246 PARABLES OF JESUS 

man, tossed to and fro as he may be by 
the stress of his passions, there is this true 
self: neglected, forsaken, yet not destroyed. 
It is ''the Man in men" — that image of 
God in which he was made. It is, as 
R. L. Stevenson says, "the thought of 
duty, the thought of something owing to 
himself, to his neighbour, to his God; an 
ideal of decency to which he would rise, if 
it were possible, a limit of shame below 
which, if it be possible, he will not stoop." 
In every man, if we could but reach it, there 
is this surviving remnant of the true self. 
As even poor desperate Ratclifife, in ''The 
Heart of Midlothian," admits, "A' body 
has a conscience though it may be ill 
wunnin at it." Once won and touched, it 
is true to its birth. It remembers its Home. 
We "come to ourselves" when we awake 
from this miserable feverish dream-life of 
sin, and realize its delusiveness and remem- 
ber the real life of the Home to which in 
the truth of our being we belong. "When 
he came to himself he said. How many 
hired servants of my father's have bread 



THE PRODIGAL SON 247 

enough and to spare, and I perish here with 
hunger." 

Some of us, perhaps, can understand 
that exclamation from our own experience. 
We thought, it may be, of the forces, 
the flowers, the birds, of Nature, the 
''hired servants" in the Father's House, 
fulfilling quietly and tranquilly the will of 
God, and contrasted with their peace the 
restlessness and disorder of our self-chosen 
life. Or, we thought of the dutiful faith- 
ful men we knew, and longed for their 
steadfast simplicity; we shrank before the 
conviction that we were losing touch with 
them, and rapidly, if only in our secret 
lives, identifying ourselves with the fel- 
lowship of sin; and our heart cried, ''O, 
shut not up my soul with the sinners." 
Then as our thought went back to the life 
of the Home, it concentrated itself on the 
centre of it all — the Father whom we had 
forsaken. Then remorse, in itself only 
bitter and hopeless, became contrition, the 
pain of the soul which brings its own 
healing. At the remembrance of Him — 



248 PARABLES OF JESUS 

of His patient Love in contrast with 
our shame — a strong emotion of penitent 
sorrow laid hold of us, and broke the 
chains of slavery, and our heart's de- 
sire set free turned once again towards 
home. "Our soul is escaped, even as a 
bird out of the snare of the fowler: the 
snare is broken and we are delivered." 
"I will arise and go to my Father, and 
will say unto Him, Father, I have 
sinned." 

There is but one step more, and the 
return is achieved. But it is a step of 
supreme importance. In real contrition, 
in sincere confession, the soul has offered 
its desire of return. But the will must 
turn that desire into act. It is just here 
that many a man has failed. It is not 
only by remorse, by sorrow, by confes- 
sion, however sincere in its emotion, that 
we can make our escape from the far 
country. With the deliberate energy and 
concentration of the will we must rise up 
and leave it. "He arose and came to his 
Father." 



THE PRODIGAL SON 249 



V. THE RECONCILIATION 

^ While he was yet afar off his father saw 
him and was moved with compassion and 
ran and fell on his neck and kissed him." 
He was yet afar oft, but he was moving to- 
wards home. The father, beholding that 
movement, accepts it on trust: it is the 
token that his son will finish the rest of the 
road. Therefore, even there, still afar off, 
he meets him, welcomes, forgives, and 
restores. At the sound of this twentieth 
verse our spirit must surely bend in adoring 
reverence. In it, in words w^hich go straight 
to the human heart, the Almighty and 
Eternal Father proclaims His sovereign 
mercy. In heart and will and character we 
sinful men are afar ofif; our penitence, for 
all its reality, is imperfect; our submission 
is incomplete. Yet if there be in us this 
movement of return from self to God, from 
the far country to the home, God accepts it. 
He takes us not for what we are, but for 
what we are coming to be. Because of that 



250 PARABLES OF JESUS 

"faith" — that homeward look of the re- 
turning spirit — we are "justified," reckoned 
as already returned, and accepted as sons 
in the generosity of forgiving love. "God 
commendeth His love toward us in that 
while we were yet sinners Christ died for 
us." 

Do these words bring in thoughts and 
associations strange to the simplicity of the 
story? Is there any trace in it of that 
mysterious and perplexing doctrine of the 
Atonement? The question arises very 
naturally in our minds. But notice that 
the centre of the story is the experience of 
the prodigal, not of his father. The 
thoughts and the sorrows of the father's 
heart in these long days of his son's absence 
are veiled. But surely human sympathy 
can enable us in some degree to understand 
that background of the father's pain which 
lay behind his generous forgiveness. Ever 
since the day when his son had said, 
"Divide the portion of thy substance," the 
burden of rejected love must have lain 
heavy uDon the father's soul. The news 



THE PRODIGAL SON 251 

of the young man's riotous living had 
reached the home. In proportion to his 
own goodness the father's anger must have 
mingled with his love and sorrow. There 
must have been in the secret place of his 
mind and heart some hard-won reconcilia- 
tion between his hatred of the sin and his 
love of the son. Doubtless in after years 
some knowledge of it would reach the son 
in his new and deeper fellowship with his 
father. Thus in the inner meaning of the 
parable the fact which is emphasized is the 
infinite hope for the penitent, the assurance 
of his forgiveness, not the cost at which in 
the Mind of the Holy Father it is obtained. 
How can we either ignore or measure the 
cost of forgiveness in that region of Infinite 
Holiness withdrawn from our sight? Some 
means must have been found there by which 
the hatred of absolute Goodness for the sin 
can be reconciled with the yearning of in- 
finite Love for the sinner. We can only 
know what He Himself has revealed. 
Hints there are given to us in the words and 
deeds of Him who came forth from that 



252 PARABLES OF JESUS 

hidden heart of God, hints of the cost of 
divine sacrifice by which man has been re- 
deemed from sin and his forgiveness has 
been bought. In such v^ise as human 
thought could grasp it, the Spirit of the 
Father has revealed to His Church — His 
household of returned sons — the mystery of 
the cross. Reverently, if sometimes over- 
confidently, the Church has tried to express 
the mystery in words in a doctrine of the 
Atonement. Yet the great Fact transcends 
all attempts to explain it. Before that Fact 
we can only bow the head in reverent peni- 
tent adoration. It is enough to know that 
the Cross of Him who was Son of God and 
Son of Man is alike the awful revelation of 
what our sin means to the Love of God and 
the welcome assurance of the fullness of 
His pardon. 

"And the son said unto him, Father, I 
have sinned." You will notice that it is 
after, not before, the embrace, that the con- 
fession comes. It is the goodness of God 
that leadeth to repentance. The answering 
love of the restored son can only express it- 



THE PRODIGAL SON 253 

self in his confession. In all the joy of his 
home-coming, in all the after-years of loyal 
service, the memory of that moment would 
remain; that heart of penitence would never 
become hardened. True, he no longer uses 
the words of which he had thought in the 
far country — ''make me as one of thy hired 
servants." For he knows that he has been 
already welcomed as a son. But it is this 
very fullness of the son's heart, assured al- 
ready of the Father's forgiving love, that 
speaks in the confession. Thus, to the Chris- 
tian, the confession of his sins is no doubt- 
ful, fearful, morbid effort to extract for- 
giveness from an offended Taskmaster. It 
is the spontaneous expression of his sonship. 
^'For ye received not the spirit of bondage 
again to fear, but ye received the spirit of 
adoption whereby we cry Abba, Father." It 
is that spirit of sonship which adds, 
^'Father, I have sinned against heaven and 
in thy sight." 

''But the father said to his servants, 
Bring forth quickly the best robe and put it 
on him." This was the father's answer to 



254 PARABLES OF JESUS 

the son's confession : the absolution was the 
gift of the symbols of complete sonship. We 
know with what marvellous fullness this 
part of the parable has been fulfilled for us. 
The life of sonship is the Life of the Perfect 
Son given to us. It is with that Life by his 
absolution that the penitent sinner is clothed. 
The "ring'' which is given, what is it but 
the earnest of his inheritance, the "sealing" 
of the Spirit? He is now a son in restored 
right, and that Spirit of the Eternal Son 
will gradually and in ever-deepening reality 
fulfil the true sonship within him. The 
embrace of the Father while the son was 
yet a great way off — this is what S. Paul 
calls "justification." The bestowal of the 
gifts of sonship — this is what he calls 
"sanctification." Never suppose that these 
great words, in which S. Paul summarized 
his own exultant experience, and which he 
bequeathed to Christian thought, are only 
the formulae of barren doctrines. They are 
latent here in the very heart of that parable, 
which is the simplest unfolding of the 
Gospel of God's Love. 



THE PRODIGAL SON 255 

"And they began to be merry." For 
"there is joy among the angels of God over 
one sinner that repenteth." We have read 
again this old story of the Father's forgiv- 
ing Love. Does it leave us untouched — a 
sound of v^ords, beautiful indeed, but sig- 
nifying nothing in our own actual lives? 
Or does it leave us with some echo in our 
hearts of that "music and dancing," some 
hymn of praise rising from our experience 
as men who have known the far country 
and have now come home again? 



VI. THE ELDER SON 

This solemn question reminds us that in 
the parable there is one, the elder son, to 
whom all the joy of the household is alien, 
indeed repellent. If we cannot find our own 
experience at all interpreted by the younger 
son, is It possible that our place may be 
with the elder? 

Doubtless at the moment when the par- 
able was spoken the elder son was meant to 



256 PARABLES OF JESUS 

represent the hard, self-satisfied Pharisees 
who were offended by the spectacle of a 
Rabbi "receiving sinners and eating with 
them." Doubtless, also, we may take him 
to represent the whole race of the Jews in 
its self-righteous contempt for the sinful 
Gentiles. But it is possible— and more 
profitable — for us to find him among the 
men of our own day, or even in our own 
character. Here is a man who has never 
left his home : who has been faithful in the 
discharge of all its duties (v. 29) — at the 
moment of the prodigal's return he is at 
work quietly and dutifully in the field. Is 
he not typical of a very common type of 
respectable and conventional religion? He 
resents the disturbance of his home life by 
all this fuss and noise and unusual excite- 
ment over the return of a man "who has 
devoured his living with harlots." Have we 
not met with him, let us say, in the decent 
regular "member of the congregation" who 
grumbles at the abnormal excitement and 
enthusiasm of a Mission for the conversion 
of the careless, or in the severely respect- 



THE PRODIGAL SON 257 

able churchwoman who "does not wish to 
hear about all that Rescue work among the 
fallen"? Truly, there is only too much of 
this elder-brotherly religion in our churches, 
and — to be quite honest — in ourselves. 

Consider him, then, as he is presented 
here in this parable. He shares the life and 
work of the Home; but plainly his spirit 
remains hard, thankless, unsympathetic. 
Never has the word "Father" left his lips 
with that cry of personal need, that appeal 
of awakened love, which filled it when 
it was upheaved from the broken heart 
of the younger son in the far country. 
"Father" will never mean so much to him 
until he, too, has learned to add, "I have 
sinned, and am no more worthy to be called 
thy son." There is, indeed, no suggestion 
that it would be well for him also to go out 
into that far country and, through tasting 
the bitterness of its disappointments, to 
realize the love and peace of home. "O 
felix culpa!" is a dangerous cry. But it 
is in his own quiet and orderly life that he 
must find the proofs of his unworthiness 



258 PARABLES OF JESUS 

and the need of penitence. And this will 
come to him if he hears in the words, 
"Child, thou hast ever been with me, and 
all that is mine is thine," the accents of a 
love to which his dull, self-centred life has 
given but a poor return. He must feel that 
the very order and quietness of his life has 
been a call to him to enter into a fellowship 
of special closeness and joy with his father 
— a call to which he has made a very 
grudging response. It is this humility 
alone which can open out the springs of 
his love. Again, he ought to have found in 
that security of the home the ground of a 
compassion all the more real for the prodi- 
gal who had left it; and a longing all the 
more earnest for his return. "I have bread 
enough and to spare, and he, my brother, 
is perishing with hunger" — if this had been 
his thought night and day, then even though 
he had never left his home he could have 
shared to the full the joy of the return. 

This, my brother, was dead and is alive 
again; he was lost and is found." 

Thus — to apply these thoughts — if any of 



THE PRODIGAL SON 259 

you, my readers, have by God's goodness 
been kept from the sins of the far country, 
if your life has not been harassed or your 
flesh beset by great temptations, if your 
observance of religion has been regular and 
dutiful, then thank God indeed; but always 
beware of the shadow of the elder brother — 
the hardening of the heart. It is the teach- 
ing of Jesus that the sins of the soul are 
more grievous than the sins of the flesh: 
and the sin of self-satisfaction is the most 
damning of all. Those w^hose lot has been 
cast in quiet places, whose life has been 
protected from the grosser sins, whose re- 
ligion has been orderly, must keep watch 
against the entry of this danger. There are 
two main defences against the elder-broth- 
erly spirit which they must use. The first 
is — they must always keep before their con- 
sciences the infinite claims of an infinite 
love. Measured by those claims, there is 
no life which has not need of the prayer 
"God be merciful to me a sinner." Every 
privilege possessed is only a claim for 
deeper thankfulness; every point of safety 



26o PARABLES OF JESUS 

gained is to be the starting-point for a new 
effort; every temptation overcome is to set 
the soul free for its quest of a higher holi- 
ness; every token of God's love is to be the 
call for a deeper, more self-sacrificing love 
in response. And the second defence 
against the sin of the elder brother is the 
charity v/hich seeks to bring back the prodi- 
gals who are wandering in the far country. 
From every blessing received, we ought to 
look upward in thanks to God who gave it, 
and around in compassion to those who 
have lost or never known it. Those whose 
life is safe and protected are just those who 
are specially called to succour those whose 
lives are encompassed by temptation and 
harassed by struggle. The ever present 
thought of the greatness of God's Love and 
the greatness of man's need — it is this, and 
this alone, which can save us from the sin 
of the hard and thankless heart. "From all 
hardness of heart, good Lord deliver us!" 



THE LOST SHEEP 



THE LOST SHEEP 

S, Luke XV. 3-7 ; S. Matt, xvlii. 12-14 

I. THE SEVERITY OF THE PARABLES 

The study of the parables leaves an im- 
pression of severity upon the mind. There 
is scarcely one which does not contain the 
most solemn warnings and give rise to the 
most anxious searching of the heart. ''The 
Word of God" spoken in them ''is living, 
active, and stronger than any two-edged 
sword, and piercing even to the dividing of 
soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, 
and quick to discern the thoughts and in- 
tents of the heart." Some of those which 
we have not been able to consider are of 
special severity — such as the Unmerciful 



264 PARABLES OF JESUS 

Servant, the Wicked Husbandman, the 
Rich Fool, and the Rich Man and Lazarus. 
They remind us of the truth on which Dean 
Church used to insist, and which we are 
too apt to forget, that the New Testament 
is a very severe book. The severity is the 
more remarkable because it is almost al- 
ways aimed at those who consider them- 
selves righteous or whom the world con- 
siders successful. He who becomes a dis- 
ciple of Jesus enters verily a stern school. 
Yet, like the sunlight breaking through the 
clouds, even in the parables we see the light 
of the divine love breaking through the 
severity of the divine judgment. It shines 
full and clear in the last parable of which 
we thought, the Prodigal Son : and lest the 
impression left on our minds should be 
too stern, I would close our study of the 
parables by choosing one, short indeed and 
simple, yet glittering as a jewel with the 
light of divine compassion — the parable of 
the Lost Sheep. 



THE LOST SHEEP 265 



II. THE ETERNAL COMPASSION 

^What man of you having a hundred 
slteep, and having lost one of them, doth not 
leave the ninety and nine?" The contrast 
of the numbers — ninety and nine and one — 
is only meant to heighten the emphasis laid 
on the importance in the eyes of the 
shepherd of the one that was lost. To us, 
familiar as we are with the masses of people 
gathered especially in our great cities, 
wandering through all the sins and sorrows, 
the hopes and fears, the love and labour of 
human life "as sheep without a shepherd,'' 
it is more natural to think of leaving the 
one in safety to seek the ninety and nine that 
are lost. But that is not our Lord's point. 
He wishes simply to bring out the care of 
the shepherd for each single sheep. More 
and more, as we grow in care for our own 
life and for the lives of our fellows, we 
learn to stay ourselves upon the great truth 
— that God's knowledge and love of each 
single soul is absolute. "Are not five spar- 
rows sold for two farthings? and not one of 



266 PARABLES OF JESUS 

them is forgotten in the sight of God. But 
the very hairs of your head are all num- 
bered. Fear not : ye are of more value than 
many sparrows." It is of all truths the 
most certain: for God would not be God 
unless it were true. He would not be 
infinite in knowledge or love unless He 
knew with absolute completeness and loved 
with absolute intensity every single soul. 
And it is of all truths the most sustaining. 
It means that any solitary soul who at any 
time and in any part of the world has wan- 
dered from its true good is marked and 
missed and wanted by Almighty God. 
Place yourself in imagination in the centre 
of a great city, say in a crowded street in 
East London, watch the stream of lives, 
toil-worn and anxious, or noisy and light- 
hearted, as it flows past you; note the chil- 
dren, on whose faces the coming shadows 
have not yet fallen, the laughing lads and 
girls keeping the shadows at bay by the 
boisterousness of their animal spirit, the 
working men and harassed women with 
their looks of either good-humoured pati- 



THE LOST SHEEP 267 

ence or sullen endurance: think of all the 
histories of love and hope, of struggle and 
sorrow which lie behind these fleeting 
faces, half hidden by them and half re- 
vealed. Is there not here a pathos which 
would be too poignant in its appeal unless 
one's own answering pity were but a feeble 
reflection of the infinite pity in the heart of 
the Eternal? Imagine, somewhere with- 
drawn from this busy scene, in a garret per- 
haps in some back street, a young girl 
tasting alone the bitterness of the dregs of 
that cup of sin which when she first put it 
to her lips was bright and sparkling. Then 
remember that this single strayed child of 
His is to the Eternal God as the one sheep 
that was lost to the watchful shepherd. 

To think of our own lives — have there 
not been moments in the experiences of 
most of us when the sense of loneliness was 
borne in upon the soul — the sense that, after 
all, our life stands apart, its burden of sin 
or sorrow or longing unknown and un- 
shared by others? These are the very 
moments when faith can reveal to us one 



268 PARABLES OF JESUS 

eye that sees, one heart that understands, 
one hand that touches with sympathy and 
strength — the eye, the heart, the hand of the 
Eternal Compassion. To God everything 
in this universe, from the flower in the open 
field to the human soul in the mysteries of 
love and pain, is known both in its relation 
to all other things and in its own separate 
significance; and in each aspect known with 
a perfect knowledge which is one with a 
perfect love. If there is a God at all, we 
cannot believe less. Since there is a God, 
need we ask for more? Yet it is more that 
He gives. 

III. THE SHEPHERD SEEKS 

^What man of you having a hundred 
sheep, and having lost one of them, doth 
not ... ^0 after that which is lost?" We 
might conceive of a perfect knowledge 
which marks the wandering of a human 
soul as it marks the failure of a stunted 
tree — all-knowing and all-indififerent. We 
might even conceive of a vast love (we 



THE LOST SHEEP 269 

could scarcely call it perfect) which feels 
the pity of the wandering, and yet in its 
serene hold upon the mysterious wisdom of 
a plan which involves the freedom of man 
leaves the wanderer alone. But God's In- 
carnation in Jesus the Saviour reveals to us 
infinite knowledge, and love, not merely 
marking and missing, but going after the 
soul that has strayed. It reveals the coming 
forth of the Eternal Companion to seek and 
to save that which is lost. Man knows in 
his conscience that he has wandered. The 
restlessness of his heart, the inevitable sigh 
which rises from it when in a moment of 
quiet he reviews the story of his life, betray 
that knowledge. ^We have erred and 
strayed like lost sheep: we have followed 
too much the devices and desires of our 
own hearts." That after all is man's verdict 
on himself when he brings his life to the 
court of conscience. He can judge, but he 
cannot redeem himself. He knows that he 
has wandered, but he cannot compass his 
own return. It is then that, looking up to 
the immutable heavens and feeling dimly 



270 PARABLES OF JESUS 

that behind them lies surely some heart that 
knows and cares, he cries, "Oh that there 
might come forth from this vast and distant 
Power some visible Messenger of its com- 
passion, some divine Assistant of men, to 
recall them from their wandering and bring 
them back to the truth." And, in answer, 
"See the Christ stand!" 

It was a true and touching sign of the 
need of man's heart, of the welcome which 
it gave to God's answer, that the early 
Christians loved to imagine and pourtray 
their Redeemer as the strong and kindly 
Shepherd. On their gems and seals and 
household ornaments, on the tombs in 
which they laid their dead who seemed to 
have wandered to "the land where all 
things are forgotten," they imprinted the 
likeness of the Shepherd. Since they were 
still, as it were, in the bright early morning 
of their redemption, they loved to represent 
him as a shepherd blithe and strong and 
beautiful. As it was the image of this Good 
Shepherd which was the first to attract and 
express the grateful love of the Christian 



THE LOST SHEEP 271 

Church, so is it not this same image that we 
would wish to have before our eyes at the 
last, when we, too, set forth upon our dim 
journey, lost to sight, along the untrodden 
ways of death? ^'The Lord is my Shep- 
herd; therefore can I lack nothing. Yea, 
though 1 walk through the valley of the 
shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for 
Thou art with me; Thy rod and Thy staff 
comfort me." How can we measure the 
difference to the world and to our own life 
since we have had the vision of Jesus as the 
Shepherd who "goes after" the sheep that 
is lost? 



IV. THE SHEPHERD FINDS 

"He goes after that which is lost until 
he find it/' When the shepherd has gone 
forth nothing daunts him, nothing stops his 
course: he goes on until he finds. Before 
the Good Shepherd who came forth on that 
first Christmas morning, as He lay in His 
mother's arms, what a weary stretch of 



272 PARABLES OF JESUS 

travelling lay! The journeyings to and fro 
wherein "the Son of Man had not where to 
lay his head," the long vigils on the moun- 
tains, the weariness and disappointment, the 
betrayal by His disciples, the agony in the 
garden, the shame of Calvary, and that last 
and awful desert void of the very sense of 
the Father's presence, from which the cry 
rose, "My God, my God, why hast Thou 
forsaken me?" The seeker had gone so far 
that He was, as it were, identified with the 
pain of the lost. He made all that long 
journey so that no one lost anywhere in the 
desert of sin or sorrow should ever doubt 
but that the Shepherd was at hand Who 
had gone after him until He found him. 
There is no distance from which by the 
power of His redeeming grace we may not 
make our return to God. 

There is, indeed, one limit, though only 
one, which the Good Shepherd Himself 
cannot overpass — it is the limit of man's 
own consent to be found and restored. He 
cannot find the soul which to the end, in 
spite of all His seeking, says, "I will not 



THE LOST SHEEP 273 

have Thee." We dare not assert, whatever 
we may dare to hope, there will be no one 
"finally lost." All we can say — is it not 
enough? — is that whatever infinite Love 
can do to bring back every single wanderer 
will be done. Can we not trust to the utter- 
most a Love which showed the measure of 
its longing on the Cross? 



V. THE SHEPHERD REJOICES 

"And when he hath found it, he layeth 
it on his shoulders, rejoicing. And when 
he Cometh home, he calleth together his 
friends and neighbours, saying unto them. 
Rejoice with me, for I have found my 
sheep which was lost. I say unto you that 
even so there shall be joy in heaven over 
one sinner that repenteth." This word of 
Jesus — "I say unto you," I who know as 
none other knows — is a welcome token that 
there is no impassible barrier between our 
world of difficulty and doubt, of long 
struggle and wistful aspiration, of failures 



274 PARABLES OF JESUS 

and of shadows, and that eternal world of 
Reality and Truth, of Rest and Achieve- 
ment, where the will of God is ever done. 
There is knowledge there of our struggles 
and mistakes, joy there at the sight of any 
human life, after many wanderings, 
brought back to the truth. We are, even 
when we seem to be most alone, "encom- 
passed about with a great cloud of wit- 
nesses." In that world, where the atmo- 
sphere is Truth itself, things are seen in 
their true proportions: joy is found in the 
things that are truly joyful. It is a wonder- 
ful thought that even we can cause this "joy 
in heaven" : and that we do so not by our 
successes, our wealth, and our fame, but by 
that penitence with which in the secrecy of 
our souls we respond to the seeking Son of 
God, and allow Him to find us and bring 
us back to Himself. But here we reach a 
region where it is best to think in silence. 



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